Prototypes: Artistic Research Processes on Technology and Life, as its title suggests, addresses a debate that is both sharply delimited and timely. Its central concerns lie at the intersection of the philosophy of technology, contemporary aesthetics, art involving living media, and artistic research. At a deeper level, however, the book is driven by a broader question: whether art can function, today, as a genuinely critical discourse. Sebastián Lomelí asks to what extent art can do more than simply mobilize technology: he explores how it might also problematize the technological as such, and how, rather than merely operating on living matter, it may foreground the social, political, material, and conceptual tensions through which “life” is currently understood and produced. In his words:

Like many philosophers these days, Shea takes concepts to be mental representations instead of abstract entities and begins from a familiar starting point (Chapter 1): While human thinking takes many forms (e.g., we can think by manipulating visual images), it also involves a kind of thinking “undoubtedly unique to humans” (1), which he calls “reasoning”. Reasoning involves formal, content-insensitive inferences: that is, inferences that are determined by the form of thoughts rather than by their content (they are maximally “content-independent”). (Shea also leaves room for material inferences in reasoning.) Reasoning takes place in steps, it is limited, and it requires attentional effort. Crucially, reasoning is only possible because thoughts involved in reasoning have a language-like nature.

While Shea does not commit himself to the language-of-thought hypothesis, his account requires the thoughts involved in reasoning to have a syntax, which allows for predication, negation, and conditional reasoning. So, on his view, thoughts involved in reasoning have a compositional structure: they have a principled decomposition into elements. Concepts are these elements, which, when combined appropriately, make up thoughts. Concepts can be combined productively, exactly as words do, allowing for new complex concepts or new thoughts.

What distinguishes Shea’s approach to concepts is the proposal that concepts have, so to speak, a double life (Chapters 1 and 5): They are not only the elements of thoughts, but they are also connected to further representational structures, which can be used in non-propositional forms of thinking such as visual imagery, simulations of actions, orientation, etc. Shea calls these representational structures “informational models” and these episodes of thought “simulations”. As he puts it: “A concept provides access to a rich body of information about its subject matter” (122). (A “body of information” in Shea’s terminology includes several informational models.) New complex concepts can trigger original simulations, which allow us to investigate new possibilities in thought, using multimodal and amodal information.

Chapter 4 examines the diversity of the informational models connected to concepts. They range from systems that encode information implicitly such as “special-purpose perceptual processing, model-free reinforcement learning, and motor control” (91) to structural representations such as cognitive maps to bodies of beliefs (“stored semantic memories”), such as prototypes or what psychologists call “theories.”

Chapter 5, the most original chapter of the book, examines how concepts access and manipulate these informational models for thinking. It also compares Shea’s views to others. Shea does not identify concepts with the explicit, belief-involving informational models, in explicit contrast to my own approach (Machery, 2009; 2015). Rather, concepts are “temporary representations in working memory” (124); they are “working memory labels” (125) that refer to something (cat refers to cats) and that point to informational models (cat points to informational models about cats). He also distinguishes his understanding of concepts as “labels” from Eliasmith’s (e.g., Blouw et al., 2016) and Quilty-Dunn’s (2021) views that concepts are “pointers”.

Finally, Shea proposes a new, ingenious theory of concept individuation. First, for a given individual, an informational model is identified by its persistence (see also Machery, 2010): Despite constant changes in which information is included, it remains the same informational model because of the temporal connection between its past and present states. Labels in working memory across occurrences are the same concept, not because they fall under the same vehicle type as one might have thought (viz. labels that are different qua vehicles can be the same concept), but because they are connected to persistent informational models.

Chapter 5 brims with new ideas, but there are some issues with the whole picture. The most puzzling one is the nature of the labeling relation between a concept and its informational models. As Shea himself acknowledges, the informational models connected to a concept are diverse, and different occurrences of the same concept can cause the manipulation of different informational models (visual imagery on one occasion, a prototype on another). What does it mean for these two token concepts to be connected to the same set of informational models, and thus, on his view, to count as the same concept? Since, as we just saw, it isn’t that they cause the use of the same informational model, it must be a dispositional property: Each occurrence of a concept can cause the manipulation of any of the informational models associated with this concept. But an occurrence of a concept can also cause the manipulation of many different things: Thinking about cats can make me think about poetry, for instance.

So, what distinguishes the relation between the concept cat and my visual imagery of cats from its relation to my emotions about, and knowledge of, poetry? If there is no difference, then why isn’t the latter part of the informational models associated with cat? And if relation to my emotions about, and knowledge of, poetry is included in these informational models, it would seem that everything gets to be included in the informational models to which a concept is connected, and it is misleading to say that a concept is a label for a particular set of informational models. It wouldn’t do to reply that my emotions about, and knowledge of, poetry are not part of the informational models associated with cats because they are not about cats.

What does it mean for an information model to be about cats? It cannot mean “information that is relevant for thinking about cats” because anything could be so relevant. Nor do informational models have genuine referential properties: What does it mean to say that a motor program related to cats is about cats? Another issue is that Shea’s concept individuation is in tension with the claim that reasoning proceeds formally (Chapter 1): If reasoning is formal, then concepts must be individuated by intrinsic, syntactic properties, and not by a relational property such as their pointing to persistent informational models. A possible response is that concepts fall under the same vehicle type within, but not across, episodes of reasoning (thanks to Shea for the suggestion). But if concept tokens can have the same vehicle within episodes of reasoning (however those are individuated), why not across episodes?

According to Shea, his architecture explains how thought does not fall prey to the frame problem (Chapter 6). As is well known, the expression “frame problem” refers to distinct, though related phenomena. Originally, the frame problem was the problem of explaining how some beliefs, but not others, are updated when we acquire new information about the world: When I learn that a blue ball has moved from one room to the next, why don’t I change my belief about its color? The expression “frame problem” then was extended to refer to the problem of explaining how if the computational theory of mind is right, thinkers can determine, in a computationally tractable way, what information is relevant, given that pretty much everything they know could be relevant (isotropy). Shea focuses on this second puzzle.

Taking his cue from deep neural networks (DNNs), artificial neural networks with many hidden layers between the input and output layers (Large Language Models are a type of DNNs), Shea argues that the mind solves the frame problem in part because of its capacity to encode, through extensive learning, a large number of built-in decision rules for classifying stimuli, which are accessed all at once, in a computationally light manner. In effect, DNNs are a good model for informational models, and their use does not fall prey to the frame problem. In addition, in reasoning, we can identify relevant information by means of heuristics. DNNs-like thinking and heuristics-based reasoning are not just “compounded”; rather they are integrated in a “hybrid” manner.

Shea proposes that concepts solve the frame problem by connecting reasoning and informational models: They take advantage of, and manipulate, the implicit relevance relations built in informational models, by modifying what is similar to what in the representational spaces these informational models embody. As he puts it,

since concepts act as an interface to special-purpose informational models, those systems can be re-purposed offline, in simulation mode, to generate relevant considerations on which to perform inferences in thought. Doing this across multiple different built-in assumptions of relevance can approximate an isotropic search for relevance. (169)

While Shea’s approach might be on the right track, some questions remain. For one, it is reasoning that is isotropic, and identifying relevant information among everything we know is primarily a problem for reasoning, as is illustrated by scientific induction or inference to the best explanation. Describing how simulations contribute to identifying relevant information does not in itself explain the isotropic nature of reasoning.

Furthermore, there is a tension between the idea that a concept is connected to particular informational models (instead of everything in the mind) and the idea that this connection explains how we deal with isotropy: the more circumscribed the models, the less isotropic concept-driven access to information is; the less circumscribed they are, the less concepts work as labels—rather, the resulting architecture begins to look like a generic dual-system architecture, where explicit reasoning is adjacent to other kinds of processes. Finally, relevance and similarity in a representational space are not the same, and transforming a representational space, thereby changing similarity relations within it, only addresses the frame problem if these transformations are made in a relevant manner, which, one might think, is the frame problem in the first place.

Be it as it may, these and other questions in no way detract from the excellence of Concepts at the Interface; rather, they highlight its depth and significance. Philosophers of cognitive science and cognitive scientists should read this book. It is a major contribution to our understanding of concepts and their role in human cognitive architecture, as well as broader philosophical and scientific questions about the mind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Nick Shea for his comments on a draft of this review.

REFERENCES

Blouw, P., Solodkin, E., Thagard, P., & Eliasmith, C. (2016). Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model. Cognitive science, 40(5), 1128-1162.

Dove, G. (2022). Abstract Concepts and the Embodied Mind: Rethinking Grounded Cognition. Oxford University Press.

Laurence, S., & Margolis, E. (2024). The Building Blocks of Thought: A Rationalist Account of the Origins of Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.

Machery, E. (2010). Replies to my critics. Philosophical Studies, 149(3), 429-436.

Machery, E. (2015). By Default: Concepts are Accessed in a Context-Independent Manner. In E. Margolis and S. Laurence (Eds.), The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts (pp. 567-588). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McCaffrey, J. (in press). Concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quilty‐Dunn, J. (2021). Polysemy and thought: Toward a generative theory of concepts. Mind & Language, 36(1), 158-185.

This volume seeks to rectify that. It contains twelve chapters written by an impressive roster of philosophers, most of whom are primarily known not for their work on Newman but for other contributions to the field. Consequently, their chapters display a shared interest in not just the historical project of understanding Newman’s ideas on their own terms but also the constructive project of developing and evaluating those ideas in relation to current philosophical work on related questions and themes. Overall, while I make some critical remarks below, I think the volume is quite successful in achieving its aim and consequently highly recommend it.

In Chapter 1, Duncan Pritchard compares Newman’s anti-Lockean virtue epistemology with the hinge epistemology he has argued elsewhere can be found in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and can be developed into a distinctive, “quasi-fideistic” religious epistemology. The key upshot of Pritchard’s comparative analysis is that “Newman ends up with a position whereby our hinge commitments, especially our religious hinge commitments, are known, unlike Wittgenstein, where they simply aren’t in the market for knowledge” (15). After exploring how each thinker arrives at his distinctive position, Pritchard concludes with a constructive proposal for an innovative religious epistemology that combines insights from both Newman and Wittgenstein.

In Chapter 2, Frederick Aquino and Logan Gage seek to locate Newman’s general epistemological position on the map of contemporary positions. In contrast to other recent authors, they argue that Newman is best understood as a common sense epistemologist, committed to a moderate form of evidentialism, rather than a proto-phenomenologist, hinge epistemologist, or Reformed epistemologist. Readers less familiar with Newman’s work will find this chapter to offer a very helpful and accessible overview of key epistemological themes in his writings.

In Chapter 3, however, Tyler McNabb and Michael DeVito take a different approach. They discuss in what ways Newman offers, on the one hand, a kind of hinge epistemology and, on the other hand, a kind of Reformed epistemology. Building on recent work by Stephen Grimm, they argue that when it comes to many ordinary people’s belief in God’s existence, Newman is best understood as holding a kind of Reformed epistemology, according to which, through the natural operation of our consciences, we can come to a non-inferentially justified belief and knowledge that God exists. This belief is neither an “arational hinge commitment” nor the result of an inference but rather the output of a faculty (human conscience) that “is aimed toward producing theistic belief in an immediate way” (55). At the same time, they suggest that regarding ordinary people’s commitment to the reliability of their own cognitive faculties, Newman does seem to offer a kind of hinge epistemology since for Newman “it’s impossible for [any subject] S to evaluate in a positive or negative manner her commitment to the reliability of her cognitive faculties” (57).

While interesting, one limitation of both Chapters 2 and 3 is that they don’t highlight how Newman’s work on these topics offers anything particularly new or fruitful for contemporary discussions. Instead, they focus just on arguing for his inclusion in one contemporary camp or another.

In Chapter 4, Sean Kelsey strives to clarify Newman’s claim that certitude is “indefectible,” i.e., “an act or state of mind that, once acquired, is permanent” (69), and defend Newman’s treatment of this issue as “not at all the incompetent mess that it is sometimes made out to be” (65). The chapter culminates in an intriguing discussion of how Newman reconciles the traditional idea that genuine religious faith involves certitude with the idea that such religious faith is nonetheless widely available to ordinary believers. Though the chapter is exegetically dense, readers interested in the nature and epistemology of religious faith will find this discussion quite interesting.

In Chapter 5, Stephen Grimm seeks to clarify why, despite accusations to the contrary, Newman should not be regarded as a proponent of dogmatism. Following Heather Battaly, Grimm defines dogmatism as one species of a broader vice of close-mindedness, viz., a closed-mindedness about one’s existing beliefs. This raises the question: “if dogmatists are those who hold onto their beliefs too strongly, what would it mean to hold onto one’s beliefs not too strongly, but correctly, with just the right touch?” (86). Grimm discusses four options – tentative settling, never settling, committed settling, and permanent settling—and argues that Newman defends a general policy of committed settling. Grimm then illustrates how clarifying Newman’s position on this can lead to a richer understanding of his distinctive notion of the “illative sense” as a capacity we can use virtuously to judge not only “when properly to close a question in thought but also when properly to open it up again” (94). Finally, the chapter closes with an original and compelling defense of a Newman-inspired policy of committed settling as a virtuous way of managing our beliefs, one that manifests not the vice of dogmatism but rather the virtue of epistemic resilience (or what other recent scholars have called epistemic grit).

I highly recommend this chapter as one of the best in the book. It not only skillfully relates Newman’s work to contemporary discussions of interesting philosophical issues but also demonstrates how some of Newman’s more distinctive ideas (such as his discussion of the “illative sense”) offer interesting, underexplored avenues for current philosophers to consider.

In Chapter 6, Luca Tuninetti explores how Newman’s work on certainty fits into the history of modern epistemology told by Robert Pasnau in After Certainty. Tuninetti argues that Newman, overlooked in Pasnau’s narrative, offers a distinctive and still relevant solution to a question Pasnau identifies as central to the history of modern epistemology, namely “how the aspiration to firmly believe anything may be reconciled with the idea that belief must be proportioned to the evidence one has and the realization that certainty may be hardly possible in most cases” (104).

In Chapter 7, Milburn, Aquino, and Distelzweig explore how Newman’s work might contribute to contemporary philosophical discussions of the aims of education. Their first step is exegetical: they argue that for Newman “the primary epistemic aim of education is to instill those dispositions and states of mind that, when regularly actualized, result in intellectual flourishing” (126). The process of acquiring such dispositions and states of mind is the process of “perfecting” one’s intellect. They then argue Newman is correct to think that this perfection of the intellect consists in what he calls “the philosophical habit of mind” or “philosophical knowledge”, which is a knowledge of “how the various disciplines complete and correct each other to give an understanding of reality as a whole” (135). In the background here is the thought, advanced by Newman, that each science or discipline involves some degree of “abstraction” from the parts of reality with which it is not concerned and hence cannot on its own provide the kind of comprehensive knowledge of reality that is the primary epistemic aim of education (134). Finally, the authors defend Newman’s claim that this comprehensive knowledge should be the primary epistemic aim of education. One key argument they make is that this account can offer a unifying explanation as to why various other things claimed as aims of education (e.g., justified belief, knowledge, critical thinking, etc.) are all indeed genuine though subordinate aims of education, for these are all “constitutive of or instrumental to” the aforementioned comprehensive (or “philosophical”) kind of knowledge (140).

In Chapter 8, Lorraine Keller offers a nuanced analysis of Newman’s distinction between “real” and “notional” apprehension and the role this distinction plays in Newman’s discussion of conscience as an important avenue for “real” rather than merely “notional” assent to propositions about God. Keller then offers an interesting discussion of how Newman’s ideas on this topic can be fruitfully compared with and help expand Eleonore Stump’s recent work on “Franciscan knowledge” of God.

In Chapter 9, Mark Wynn explores various threads in Newman’s thinking about “the significance of affective states for religious thought and practice” (166). This is a rich and complex chapter that develops Newman’s reflections on this topic in creative dialogue with the work of other thinkers, such as Peter Goldie, Ronald de Sousa, and Iris Murdoch. Wynn draws out some key implications of thinking, as Newman does, about religious experience as primarily affective rather than perceptual. He also explores Newman’s reflections on the role that such affective religious experiences can play in generating or closing episodes of religious inquiry. Finally, he skillfully unpacks Newman’s idea that existentially weighty affective experiences (such as our experiencing abiding sorrow over our moral failures) might affect how the theist assesses the antecedent probabilities of further religious claims (such as that God has provided a remedy for our moral failures), with the result that one ends up needing “less evidence if they are to believe, with no failure of rationality, that [such] a revelation has in fact been given” (184). Overall, what emerges are several interesting avenues for thinking about the role affective experiences can play in religious belief and inquiry.

In Chapter 10, Kegan Shaw brings Newman’s discussion of conscience as a key natural source of belief in God into dialogue with contemporary cognitive science of religion (CSR). The chapter has two main parts. First, Shaw observes,

If Newman is right that the moral conscience plays an important role in naturally inclining humans toward theistic belief, then we should expect…to be able to tell a plausible story about how the elements of this disposition conferred an adaptive advantage on our remote ancestors (or else piggybacked on features that conferred an adaptive advantage). (194-5)

Shaw argues that current work in evolutionary psychology and CSR does in fact support such a story. Second, prominent Christian authors (such as Alvin Plantinga) have suggested that sin, or moral wrongdoing, can disrupt the normal functioning of cognitive dispositions that would otherwise naturally produce theistic beliefs. But should we think that all such cognitive dispositions are disrupted by sin? In the second part of his chapter, Shaw argues that there are good reasons to think that repeated sin would in fact disrupt the natural operation of conscience in producing belief in God, while it is much less clear whether it would disrupt other such cognitive dispositions. If he is right, then “there is an argument from this chapter for thinking that Newman truly gets to the heart of the matter by focusing on the role of the moral conscience in naturally propping up theistic belief” (210).

In Chapter 11, Kirstin Carlson and David McPherson show how contemporary philosophers might build on Newman’s idea that experiences of conscience provide an important and widely available avenue to belief in God. They argue that while Newman is right that experiences of conscience can play this role, he is “still too one-sided…in his depiction of our natural religiosity as centering on conscience” (222). They explain, “Above all, the image that our natural conscience provides of God is that of a righteous Judge” (222). Further, since Newman thinks we frequently sin, “this means that we typically encounter God as being displeased with us and calling us to account” (222). In correction to this, Carlson and McPherson explore how “the experience of being drawn to goodness and called upon to be properly responsive to it is another way in which we can come to a real assent to God” (224). To illustrate what they have in mind, they focus on experiences of beauty. They argue that, just as certain kinds of experiences of conscience can naturally lead to belief in a divine person to whom we are accountable, certain kinds of experiences of natural beauty can naturally lead to belief in a divine creator of that beauty. Furthermore, they argue (quite compellingly in my view) that recognizing this point is practically important to how we understand the religious life (and how we can overcome what they describe as “spiritual alienation”), as this involves not just moral striving but also a certain pervasive posture of “receptivity and appreciation” (228).

In Chapter 12, John Cottingham argues that “what Newman has to say about conscience has an enduring interest that transcends his historical context” (235). The chapter begins with a rich account of conscience as involving four principal aspects, all of which are found in Newman’s treatment of it. Conscience is imperatival (it tells one to do or refrain from doing certain things); authoritative (one feels one ought to do what one’s conscience commands); cognitive (when one’s conscience commands one to φ or not φ, one perceives or judges φ-ing to have a relevant moral status); and phenomenological (one often feels a certain kind of emotional discomfort or calmness connected to whether one has violated or followed one’s conscience). Cottingham contrasts Newman’s treatment of these four aspects of conscience with deflationary accounts offered by other authors such as Freud, Nietzsche, and Mill. Finally, Cottingham discusses Newman’s claim that the experience of conscience provides powerful evidence for God. As Newman puts it in one sermon quoted by Cottingham here, “the very existence of [this commanding voice within us] carries on our minds to a Being exterior to ourselves; for else whence did it come?” (242). Though Cottingham insists Newman’s argument is “not a coercive one” (245), he claims nonetheless that it is an “argument of considerable power” (244). Why exactly? Unfortunately, Cottingham offers little support for this judgment beyond a brief discussion of why one Freudian objection to Newman’s position is not very compelling.

Though I have offered some critical remarks along the way, I conclude by emphasizing again that I think the volume is quite successful in achieving its aim. The contributors have done an excellent job of pulling out key ideas from Newman’s work, presenting those ideas in a manner that is accessible to a wide range of readers regardless of their prior Newman knowledge, and illustrating the relevance of those ideas to current work in the field.

Chapter 1 proceeds with Hamilton making the case for the existence of the artist-entertainer. Certain works can be thought of as pure entertainment (e.g., cat videos, pulp fiction stories, etc.), while other works are what Hamilton deems esoteric or hermetic art, which are produced by artists unconcerned with the expectations or desires of their audience (e.g., works by Proust and Joyce). However, the artist-entertainer (e.g., according to Hamilton, Louis Armstrong, Charles Dickens, etc.), in regard to both their intention as well as reception, entertains as well as challenges, generating audience attention while also meriting such attention through the production of a work that is worthy of aesthetic regard.

In Chapter 2, Hamilton traces the history of the concepts of art and entertainment, as he argues that their categories are not eternal and that “we must consider their historical contexts and development” (38). Prior to the 18th century, “art” did not carry an inherent aesthetic connotation but was akin to something more like “craft.” However, this is not to say that art, as we understand it contemporarily, did not exist prior to this, since, as Hamilton argues, from the fact that a historically centered group does not conceive of themselves as X, it does not follow that they are not X. As such, we can distinguish between self-conscious art and unself-conscious art, which parallels a similar distinction in the conceptualization of entertainment in regard to its formalization and professionalization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Chapter 3 contains Hamilton’s (defense of his) definition of art: “an audience-directed practice or performance normally involving skill, with a conscious aesthetic end, that in central cases richly rewards aesthetic attention, in virtue of its inseparable form and content” (54). Such a definition allows us to recognize and appreciate art for art’s sake: art that contains value simply by the aesthetic experience one has by consuming it, and it prioritizes the aesthetic as fundamental to the nature of art. However, important for Hamilton’s project, conceiving of art in this way does not preclude the possibility of a performer and/or a work having additional, non-aesthetic ends (e.g., aims regarding a work’s religious, political, or, of particular note, entertainment value).

In Chapter 4, Hamilton defends his model of artistic criticism, which he takes to be the same skill as the exercise of one’s aesthetic judgments. Recall that, in regard to understanding the distinction between art and entertainment, Hamilton aims to reject both the modernist and post-modernist views, in favor of a middle way (that art and entertainment are neither identical nor mutually exclusive). Similarly, in regard to artistic criticism, on Hamilton’s view, we ought to reject both elitism (i.e., the reliance on or privileging of the leadership of particular dominant art critics), as well as populism (i.e., the rejection of critical standards altogether). In contrast, Hamilton argues for an appreciative, non-verdictive model, which advocates that criticism ought to rest on experience, while sliding into neither elitism nor populism. Ultimately, the view entails a type of meritocracy (a term which Hamilton begrudgingly employs) as it advocates that “one should try to develop one’s aesthetic sensibility, to become a true critic. But it also insists that everyone…has a place in critical discourse” (100).

In Chapter 5, Hamilton yet again carves out a middle path in his defense of a Kantian conception of artistic genius. What nearly all accounts should agree on, Hamilton contends, is that a genius is a person of exceptional talent “who manifests unusual creativity through natural ability and personal application” (127). However, on the Romantic conception of genius, all such ability is not only innate but perhaps even the result of divine inspiration. The Nietzschean approach, in contrast, (perhaps understandably) regards the Romantic conception as a product of superstition and consists in something of a deflationary account of genius in which the artist (who is said to be a genius) is merely a master of his art, so much so that he may deceive his audience into being awed. But on the Kantian view, though genius is naturally endowed (i.e., it is innate), it can (and often must) be realized through study and practice, and it is the talent through which rule-governing exemplars are produced. That is, genius is not merely an extreme amount of talent; it is that capacity which allows for the production of true originality through which other artworks may be judged.

Chapter 6 concerns the notion of canon, a concept which finds its origin in the early Christian church and refers to those prophets or works which the church found to be genuinely divinely inspired. In contrast, a work can be thought of as part of an artistic canon insofar as it can be said to exemplify an ideal. However, Hamilton also suggests that what brings a work into the (or a) canon is that it passes the test of time, which is important to his distinction between art and entertainment, as a piece of art, on Hamilton’s view, is crafted to pass the test of time, while a piece of entertainment is aimed at passing the test of its time. Nevertheless, Hamilton emphasizes that it’s a mistake to speak of the canon. Rather, he identifies three different types of canons: 1) the disciplinary canon, which is constituted by works prescribed on the basis of formal considerations; 2) the repertorial canon, made up of “books, scores, and plays in print or performed”; and 3) the critical canon, which comprises “works discussed in the media and academic journals” (161).

In Chapter 7, Hamilton turns his attention to the concept of design. He understands design as the attempt to, or the conceiving of how to achieve, some practical end with style. Thus, it is rarely the case that any artifact is created with the aim of pure style; nor is it often created for some sort of problem-solving end. And this is analogous to the contention that a performance can only occasionally be thought of as either pure art or pure entertainment, as the categories are bound to and often do overlap. Ultimately, Hamilton argues that artifacts that have been designed successfully “exhibit an interpretation of, or dynamic interaction between, styling and problem solving” (199).

Finally, in Chapter 8, Hamilton considers the issue of cultural appropriation and the way in which the critique of cultural appropriation can conflict with artistic freedom. Though cultural appropriation critique is not without merit, Hamilton argues, it often mistakenly adopts a neoliberal model of cultural ownership and fails to recognize that “multicultural models correctly recognize that globalization can have benign effects” (229). Ultimately, we ought to recognize a distinction between cultural appropriation and cultural exploitation, where cultural exploitation is the appropriate target of critique.

In addition to Hamilton’s primary arguments throughout the main thread, the book is interspersed with six enlightening interviews with artists (or artist-entertainers, as described in Chapter 1) and other thinkers who aid Hamilton in elucidating various themes and concepts: jazz vocalist, composer, and educator, Louise Gibbs; composer, Mark Carroll; violinist, Mandhira de Saram; professor of philosophy, James O. Young; professor of performing arts, James Parakilas; and musician and scholar, Molly Barnes.

There is a great deal to praise in the book, both regarding the clarity with which it has been composed as well as the broad scope of its subject matter. And both scholars and students (of both philosophy and the arts in general) will be able to laud the carefulness of Hamilton’s arguments. But this is not to say that the work isn’t without its omissions or shortcomings.

Recall that in Chapter 4, Hamilton argues for a meritocratic account of criticism, which he deems as respecting the democracy of taste. The view purports to avoid slipping into elitism (which dictates that experts legislate aesthetic taste) on the one hand, and populism (which entails an embrace of wholesale subjectivism) on the other. However, a problem arises as the meritocratic model argues 1) criticism itself is an art, 2) “every serious opinion is entitled to consideration, and yet the judgments of those with experience carry a special weight” (97-98), even though 3) there are no absolute values or truths. It is difficult to see how these ideas might be reconciled. The notion that we give special consideration to every serious opinion seems like it will only be intelligible if there exists some sort of absolute (or perhaps objective) standard, value, or truth. Should such values or truths exist, why shouldn’t we expect that there be experts who might have a unique grasp of them? This would seem to entail that at least some form of elitism is true. But should we remove the qualification that an opinion must be serious in order to be given special consideration (since doing so seems to imply absolute or objective standards), this would seem to entail a slide into full-on populism.

In addition, there is a related methodological question to be raised regarding the central thesis of Hamilton’s project, that we ought to reject both the modernist and the post-modernist conceptions of art and entertainment. It seems that if we were to take something of a populist approach to this question, we would be led inevitably much closer to the post-modernist conception (that the distinction between art and entertainment breaks down completely and that the two concepts are perfectly overlapping), as contemporary audiences seem to be particularly liberal in their use of the term “art”. However, if we are to reject a sort of procedural definition of art at a popular level, then it is simply an open question on what basis (or by which standards) we are to determine these conceptual questions, which the book does not address.

Nevertheless, in the end, Hamilton’s Art and Entertainment is a worthwhile addition to the contemporary discussion of a wide variety of topics in philosophy, aesthetics, and the arts in general. It offers both the expert and the novice a great deal of thoughtful engagement with these issues.

Vassilis Livanios’s The Metaphysics of Powerful Qualities is a welcome addition to this literature. Part I of the book provides a critical survey of extant powerful qualities views, beginning with the identity view and moving on to more recent proposals. While Livanios’s discussion of these views is generally charitable, he ultimately argues that each of them runs into significant difficulties. In Part II of the book, he develops and defends a novel powerful qualities view that he terms “powerful categoricalism”. Part I is not simply background for Part II, because an important part of Livanios’s argument for powerful categoricalism is that it avoids the problems he raises for other powerful qualities views in Part I. So, his arguments in Part I constitute an important part of his overall argument for the positive proposal in Part II. In Part II, he develops a second argument for his view based on the idea that it constitutes part of a compelling account of the laws of nature. I will begin by looking at the negative arguments he develops in Part I before turning to his positive proposal and the argument from laws that he gives in Part II.

Part I consists of Chapters 2 to 6 (Chapter 1 is a general introductory chapter that outlines the book’s aims and agenda). In Chapter 2, Livanios introduces powerful qualities in general before introducing and arguing against the identity theory (Chapter 3), grounding views (Chapter 4), compound views (Chapter 5) and higher-order views (Chapter 6) of powerful qualities. Livanios’s discussion of each view is detailed, often mapping out various possible versions of the view, and the arguments he mobilises against the views are wide-ranging. In addition to the role it plays in his argument, this part of the book provides an excellent critical overview of recent work on powerful qualities. Those new to the area will find a very useful introduction here, while those who are familiar with the field will find much worth thinking about. However, while I think Livanios’s careful and charitable discussions are valuable, I am dubious that he establishes that all existing views run into serious problems. In particular, I think grounding views can get around the main problem he raises for them.

The key idea behind grounding views is that properties have qualitative identities or essences, but, nonetheless, ground dispositions. Livanios’s main argument against these views is that they fail to capture a powerful qualities view and, instead, collapse into some other account of properties (Section 4.3.4). His argument works by trying to show that this result follows, given either an operational or a predicational account of grounding. I will focus on his discussion of the predicational account. Given this account, the grounder and the groundee both exist and are independent entities. So, combining the grounding view with this conception of grounding entails that both qualities and dispositions exist and are separate entities. Livanios thinks this result means that the grounding view ultimately entails the existence of distinct qualities and dispositional properties. Consequently, he thinks the grounding view is actually a version of property dualism rather than a powerful qualities view.

It seems to me that proponents of grounding views can respond to this objection by clarifying how they understand powers. Powers have been understood both as properties that are identical to dispositions or clusters of dispositions, and as properties that in some appropriate sense “bestow” dispositions. The grounding view fits naturally with the latter view, as it allows us to say that a property bestows a disposition—and so is a power—just if it grounds dispositions in the right way. The grounding theorist can, then, say that properties are identical with powers, because they ground dispositions in the right way. Because properties have qualitative essences, they are also identical with qualities. The result is a ground-theoretic version of the identity theory, on which properties are identical to both powers and qualities. This seems to me to constitute a robust version of the powerful qualities view. I also do not think this view leads to property dualism properly understood. Within the literature, property dualism is not simply the view that both qualities and dispositions or powers exist but rather the view that they are metaphysically on a par. So, for instance, while orthodox categoricalists allow that dispositions exist, they are still categoricalists rather than property dualists, because they hold that dispositions are less fundamental than categorical properties. Given that grounding theorists hold that dispositions are less fundamental than powerful qualities, they are no more property dualists than orthodox categoricalists are. I do not think, then, that Livanios’s main criticism of grounding views succeeds. If I am right about this, though, Livanios’s first main argument for powerful categoricalism is undermined, because at least one extant version of the powerful qualities view escapes the difficulties Livanios raises for it.

Let me turn now to the argument in the second part of the book, which runs through Chapters 7 to 10. Drawing on Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos (2021), Livanios begins in Chapter 7 by introducing a “Dual Model” of the laws of nature and arguing that it avoids shortcomings of both power-theoretic and governing-law accounts of laws. The problem for powers views is that they struggle to account for the full range of scientific laws, including functional laws and conservation laws. The problem for governing laws, which Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos dub the “governing problem”, is that it is obscure how governing laws can “tell” the properties that they involve how to behave.

The Dual Model aims to avoid these problems by positing both nomic relations and powers of a special sort. It avoids the problem for standard powers views by deriving the structure of laws from external nomic relations rather than building it into the natures of first-order powers. The “governing problem” is addressed by ascribing to properties the “ultra-thin” power to enter into nomic relations, and by holding that nomic relations are relata-specific with “slots” for specific qualities. These two points are supposed to give us an account both of why properties are apt to enter nomic relations in general, because they have a power to do so, and why they enter the specific nomic relations that they do, because those relations are relata-specific. So, the Dual Model is supposed to provide an attractive non-Humean account of laws by avoiding the key problems faced by both standard power-theoretic and governing-law views.

Chapter 8 clarifies the conception of properties involved in the Dual Model and explains why it constitutes a version of the powerful qualities view. The core idea is that properties are powerful because they have the ultra-thin power to enter nomic relations, and they are qualities because they depend on external relations to play their specific nomic roles. This is the core of Livanios’s “powerful categoricalist” view of properties. Because this view is implicit in the Dual Model, the attractiveness of the dual model provides motivation for powerful categoricalism.

Chapter 9 further develops the account of laws involved in Livanios’s view. Here he argues both that the view provides a solution to the inference problem that improves on Armstrong’s solution, and that the account provides neither a governing view of laws nor a descriptivist Humean account. Chapter 10 concludes by summing up some of the important putative advantages of Livanios’s view and by responding to some potential objections.

My main worry about the argument in Part II of the book stems from the role that the “Governing Problem” plays in it. Livanios introduces the powerful nature of properties specifically as a response to this problem. So, the problem is at the heart of his motivation for accepting a powerful qualities view rather than a categoricalist view, but I am dubious that the problem can shoulder this argumentative weight. For one thing, it isn’t actually clear to me that the putative problem is a serious problem. I am not sure that I see why we cannot claim, as per Dretske-Tooley-Armstong views of laws, that it is simply a brute fact that certain properties stand in particular nomic relations. Even assuming that there is a serious problem here, it is not clear to me why the problem isn’t fully addressed by the relata-specificity of nomic relations. The existence of a given nomic relation together with its relata-specific nature seems sufficient to explain why it relates its relata. So, positing an additional power of the relata to stand in nomic relations seems otiose. Finally, even if we assume that there is some additional work to be done that relata-specificity cannot do, there seem to be ways of doing it other than appealing to a power of nomic relatability. For instance, it seems that we could appeal to metaphysical laws rather than to such a power to explain why certain properties are apt to stand in nomic relations. I doubt, then, that Livanios’s account of laws actually provides us with good reason to accept powerful categorical properties rather than standard non-powerful categorical properties.

I have expressed doubts here that Livanios’s two main arguments for powerful categoricalism succeed. I am not convinced that he shows either that all the alternatives run into serious difficulties or that a compelling account of laws entails powerful categoricalism. Nonetheless, I still think his book is a valuable contribution to recent attempts to formulate a compelling alternative to Martin and Heil’s identity theory and, so, to make good on the attractions of the powerful qualities view. The book is rich with ideas and arguments that will be of interest to anyone already familiar with this project, while also providing an excellent introduction to the project for anyone new to it.

REFERENCES

Armstrong, D. M. (2005). Four Disputes about Properties. Synthese, 144, 309–320.

Heil, J. (2003). From an Ontological Point of View. Oxford University Press.

Ioannidis, S., Livanios, V., & Psillos, S. (2021). No laws and (thin) powers in, no (governing) laws out. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 11(6), 1–26.

Martin, C.B. (1997). On the Need for Properties: The Road to Pythagoreanism and Back. Synthese, 112, 193–231.

Broadly speaking, philosophers are interested in three main sorts of questions about emotions: (1) the ontological question of what an emotion really is; (2) the (moral)-epistemological question of how emotions are related to morality (i.e., of the epistemological relationship between emotional value and moral value); and (3) the educational question of how emotions are best cultivated. Pearson confines his study parsimoniously to the first question; he does not explore the value of emotions for the moral life (or whether emotions are better understood as value donors or value recorders: the issue separating sentimentalists and rationalists), and he limits the discussion of the educational implications of his theorizing to a few lines on page 113.

Aristotle is usually considered to have offered reasonably transparent answers to questions (2) and (3), albeit not answers formulated in the language of current emotion theorists nor ones that they might agree with. The plot thickens considerably when it comes to the first sort of question, however. The standard view is of Aristotle as the first explicit cognitive theorist about emotions (or at least the suggestive forerunner of such views). However, what did he understand the relevant cognition to comprise? The most common answer to that is judgement: “The emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgements [kriseis], and are accompanied by pain and pleasure” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1378a20–21).

However, when it comes to characterizing individual emotions, Aristotle typically circumvents the word krisis and relies rather on the verb phainesthai (“to appear”), or its cognate noun, phantasia (“appearance”). It seems, then, that to experience, say, compassion (eleos), one does not need to judge another person as having suffered undeserved misfortune but only perceive of such misfortune as having happened. In either case, Aristotle appears as a cognitive emotion theorist in a more literal sense even than the early 20th century appraisal theorists, who considered cognitions the necessary eliciting conditions of emotion but still defined the latter in terms of feelings.

Giles Pearson turns this received wisdom upside down in his long and meticulously argued book. In short, while falling broadly within the cognitive camp (at least when juxtaposed with standard sensory theories), Pearson rejects both judgementalism and perceptualism. Better put, he argues that the basic insights of both judgementalism and perceptualism might be true in the case of Aristotle’s emotion theory, in the sense that both could be valid intentional states apprehending objects and laying the basis for emotional experiences. However, neither the judgement nor perception (nor imagination, free-floating thought, etc.) would constitute the emotion itself; rather the emotion is a representational pleasure or distress formed in response to those eliciting intentional states.

The key here lies in an understanding of pleasure or distress as representational (directed at internal or external objects), not as non-representational sensations or feelings, as in standard sensory theories. In a nutshell, emotions (in Aristotle’s Pearson-excavated view) are reactive hedonic responses to other (value-apprehending) intentional states. Moreover, this is not a componential theory of emotion; the emotion is identified exclusively with the hedonic response rather than the eliciting states, let alone any desires or motivations.

Consider Person C’s undeserved suffering as an intentional object. Person A might experience schadenfreude but Person B compassion (eleos) at the same apprehension of C’s suffering, so the difference between their emotions cannot lie in the mere cognition but rather in their differential reactive (hedonic) responses to it. The eliciting intentional state and the reactive one may not, however, be experienced sequentially; in our mind, it may feel as if both are happening at the same time. Pearson characterizes this alleged Aristotelian view as “a response account of emotions” (109).

As I mention below, Pearson is not primarily concerned with the benefits of his response account to solve perennial, but often non-Aristotle-related, problems in emotion theory. The major exception is in Chapter 12, where he adduces this account as ammunition to make sense of so-called recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist (apparently irrationally) despite colliding with the person’s judgement (say, the fear of a dog despite knowing that the dog is not dangerous). It is difficult to summarize Pearson’s solution in a few words because its strength is meant to lie in out-maneuvering other strategies, which he explores in considerable detail.

However, the following quote indicates the drift of Pearson’s strategy:

it is irrational to experience distress or pleasure at X (as one rationally believes X to exist) insofar as one perceives X to have property Y, when one rationally believes that X does not have property Y. (305–306)

In experiencing fear as a reactive hedonic response directed at a friendly dog, the agent is doing just this. In contrast, it would be “harsh” to insist that the perception itself is irrational (315). Recalcitrant emotions are thus not irrational judgments or perceptions (in the sense that has troubled many emotion theorists while acknowledging that those are “genuine” emotions), but rather bodily and pleasurable/painful reactions that persist even after reason has corrected the cognitive content.

Pearson is very much a philosophers’ philosopher and, more specifically, an Aristotelian exegete writing for other Aristotelians. He promises readers to identify significant philosophical payoffs of his readings, and indeed, he does so in Chapter 12 and, by implication also, in Chapter 11. However, I am sure many practically minded emotion theorists in philosophy or psychology would like to see him make good on that promise in more detail, perhaps in another publication. For example, I would love to see Pearson juxtaposing his account more directly with previous cognitive theories, broadly understood. It is abundantly clear how his account distinguishes itself from that of orthodox cognitivists amongst modern philosophers, such as Nussbaum and Solomon. However, it would have been helpful to see a direct comparison with the accounts of the early appraisal theorists, such as Magda Arnold, who defined emotions as felt action tendencies caused by appraisals.

To be fair to Pearson, he says enough (esp. in Chapter 11) for us to divine what his response to someone like Arnold would be. While sympathetic to the separation of emotions from appraisals (in the 1960s understanding of “appraisal”), Pearson would object both to the causal language in those accounts and the idea of feelings attaching themselves to motivational action tendencies (Arnold, 1960, 182). Pearson (or Pearson’s Aristotle) does not consider the intentional states apprehending value to “cause” emotions as reactive hedonic responses, nor simply to be correlated with them. Rather he considers the relation between the relevant value-apprehending intentional states and the emotion to be what he calls an “in light of” relation. The reason for rejecting causal language is that the same intentional object (say, undeserved misfortune, as in a previous example) can relate to one emotion (say, compassion) in one person but another (say, schadenfreude) in another person. In a third person, it might not even be related to any emotional state at all. This is why it is “potentially misleading” (95) to couch the relation in a strict causal language.

More putatively controversial is Pearson’s rejection of a motivational role for emotions. He makes it clear on the first page of the book that Aristotelian emotions are to be distinguished from desires or motivational states, and he expands on this claim in a number of places (esp. in Chapter 11). In this case, Pearson cites some emotion theorists, such as Scarantino (2014), without any ready-made Aristotelian philosophy in their pockets. However, his main focus is as always on Aristotelian exegesis; and he makes heavy weather here of emotions, such as shame, that seem more readily characterizable as reactions to something one has been motivated to do in the past, and now feels bad about, rather than something one is currently motivated to do.

In the end, Pearson rejects both Deonna and Teroni’s (2012) view of emotions as felt states of action readiness, as well as the view, which I ascribed above to Arnold, of emotions as felt action tendencies. In short, emotions merely play a reactive role in Aristotle, not a motivational role. Although I am at a loss to pick any holes in Pearson’s discrete exercises in Aristotelian scholarship here, I am also at a loss to understand why Aristotle then seems to ascribe an emotional component to almost all the character virtues he delineates in the Nicomachean Ethics (apart from three quasi-civic virtues of agreeable social encounters). The standard view has been to understand the emotional component to provide a motivational thrust of the virtues, but if Pearson is to be believed, that interpretation must be abandoned.

As a practically minded neo-Aristotelian reconstructor myself, I stand in awe of Pearson’s formidable Aristotelian scholarship. That said, I am still tempted to sympathize with Fortenbaugh’s view that Aristotle did not himself propose any comprehensive theory of emotions and that his general comments about them were simply his way of reporting on commonplace opinions, as a prelude to analyzing individual emotions. Yet I do not follow Fortenbaugh in assuming that Aristotle did not commit to the truth of those everyday opinions, given that he seems to have taken for granted that the opinions of the “many” and the “wise” should be considered true unless contrary evidence was unearthed. Pearson insists, in contrast, that Aristotle did in fact have such a background theory (4): namely, the systematic theory that Pearson excavates in his book.

My question is, then, why Aristotle chose not to elaborate on such a theory himself (unless he did so in one of his lost treatises) when he seemed to have had ample opportunities to do so. Whenever Aristotle talks about emotions, he seems to do so for purposes other than providing a systematic account of their ontology. In the Rhetoric, he talks about them in the context of the art of persuasion; in the Poetics, in the context of responding to tragic drama; in the Nicomachean Ethics, as part of the explication of character virtues; in the Politics, in the context of describing educational strategies in the ideal city state (e.g., the use of music to calm violent emotions and excite overly dull ones). I do not think it would have detracted in any way from the merits of Pearson’s work if he had, more modestly, described his task as that of carving an emotion theory out of the lore found in Aristotle’s text rather than retrieving a comprehensive theory that Aristotle himself held.

Let me end by stating that, some misgivings notwithstanding, I consider Pearson’s book breathtaking in terms of its scope and rigor. Future emotion theorists who delve into Aristotle’s account without engaging with this book will do so at their peril. As a quick final aside, I would also like to praise Pearson for his apt renderings of Aristotle’s terminology. I was particularly pleased to see his interpretation of the section on charis in the Rhetoric as being about feeling-grateful-for (charin echein), which firmly contradicts a common interpretation of Aristotle (because of some overblown things he says about the megalopsychos) as being anti-gratitude. My only qualm is with Pearson’s following the orthodox translation of eleos as “pity”. This is not how we understand the word “pity” nowadays, and I prefer the translation “compassion”, which enables us to reserve “pity” for Aristotle’s (unnamed) excess of compassion: namely, pain at deserved misfortune—more in line with contemporary English.

REFERENCES

Aristotle. (1985). Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin. Hackett Publishing.

Arnold, M. B. (1960). Emotion and Personality, I. Psychological Aspects. Columbia University Press.

Deonna, J. A. & Teroni, F. (2012). The Emotions: A Philosophical Iintroduction. Routledge.

Fortenbaugh, W. W. (2002). Aristotle on Emotion. Duckworth.

Konstan, D. (2006). The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and classical literature. University of Toronto Press.

Scarantino, A. (2014). The Motivational Theory of Emotions. In J. D’Arms & D. Jacobson (Eds.), Moral psychology and human agency (pp. 158-185). Oxford University Press.

In “The Way out of the World: How Parmenides Played with the Cosmology of Early Greek Poetry” (1-20), Arnaud Macé examines the mythological setting of Parmenides’ poem, in which the unnamed youth is welcomed by the daughters of Helios at the gates of the House of Night. There he meets an unnamed goddess who narrates the remainder of the poem. But where is the House of Night? Macé helpfully examines passages from early poets dealing with the mansions and paths of Helios, Night, and Day. But do the gates the youth enters lead to the heavens or the underworld? We find no clear and consistent account in the several poetic parallels. “Having thus extracted the highest cosmological achievements from the early poetic tradition”, Macé concludes, “[Parmenides] merges the two motifs of the Sun’s journey and of the Gates of Day and Night, and pushes them to their limits…into the depths where even the gods lose their bearings” (18). Macé provides a valuable review of the mythological world Parmenides draws on and wisely avoids treating the proem as a mere allegorical construction.

In “Between Thought and Thing: The Argument of Parmenides B8.6-9” (21-36), Matthew Evans examines a key argument of Parmenides’ goddess that what-is cannot be generated from what-is-not. The main premise of the argument is that “It is not to be said or thought that [what-is] is not” (23). Parmenides seems to argue from a semantic premise to a non-semantic (metaphysical) conclusion about the world. Evans considers a “deflationary reading” in which we eliminate any semantic premises, in part because the distinction between semantic and non-semantic could be anachronistic. But if we look back to fragment B2, Parmenides seems clearly to be committed to something like a semantic reading. Evans now suggests that we take the semantic premises of the argument to support the non-semantic “primary claim” that “It is not possible that [what-is] is not” (34-5). The point is that “you are (rationally) compelled to accept the non-semantic premise of the source argument [namely, B8.6-9]” (35, emphasis in original). This seems plausible. Historically, philosophers have often recognized a link between what was conceivable and what was possible on the one hand, and what was inconceivable and impossible on the other.

In “Truth and the True in Parmenides” (37-53), Alex Long offers a philological study of alethēia and related terms in Parmenides’ poem. Whereas Thomas Cole had rejected the rendering ‘reality’ and the like in favor of “something like ‘conscientious reporting’” and sees Parmenides as going further in the direction of ‘truth’, John Palmer has argued against the latter and defended the former. Re-examining epic and poetic usages, Long presents the view that “Parmenides’ use of words for truth and reality is more similar to that in early poetry than Cole himself acknowledged” (38). Long renders alēthēs in Parmenides as ‘accurate’ in B8.39, and in B8.17-18, B1.30 and B8.28 as ‘truth-telling’ (42-43, 45). Long provides a helpful review of previous studies of alethēia and related terms in early Greek literature and in Parmenides, but the rendering ‘truth-telling’ seems a bit strained.

Barbara M. Sattler addresses Parmenides’ use of logic in “Parmenides’ Method: The Power of Indirect Proofs” (54-72). She aims “to show that Parmenides’ poem can be understood as the beginning of indirect proof in philosophy and how these proofs work in his poem” (54). She begins by pointing out that indirect proof is not the same thing as a reductio ad absurdum, for the latter can be used a direct proof. She also points out that the use of counterfactuals does not by itself constitute indirect proof.

In B2 and B3, Parmenides establishes that there are only two “ways of enquiry”, that (it) is or that (it) is not. Although he seems to introduce a third way in B6, he dismisses that possibility, without, however, offering a clear argument against it. In B8, he then identifies signs of the true way, for which he “gives a series of indirect proofs showing that Being cannot be F and thus has to be not-F” (67). Parmenides seems to reflect “some new methodological awareness” of the importance of indirect proofs, possibly based on the fact that we cannot talk or think about not-being (68-69). It remains unclear whether mathematics influenced philosophy or vice versa, she observes, but indirect proofs became prominent in both fields about the same time. Sattler analyses Parmenides’ use of indirect proof and documents his influence in making it an important feature of philosophical discourse.

In “Parmenides and the Centred View” (73-90), Lea Cantor examines Parmenides’ simile comparing what-is to a sphere (B8.42-49). This passage has long been controversial: is what-is literally spherical in shape, or merely perspectivally neutral? Cantor takes the latter approach, but rejects an external viewpoint in favor of an internal one. “No matter in which direction I look from the centre, reality will look the same, and in this sense all perspectives will collapse into one” (86, emphasis in original). But this creates a new problem, because “a hypothetical observer at the centre of a sphere would not know that she is inside a sphere, let alone at its centre” (87). This leads to the further problem that “in thinking and speaking about the limits of thought…one somehow has to think and speak about the unthinkable”, which would “suggest that we [humans] are incapable of taking a perspectivally neutral view on being” (87). We end up confronting an irreducible tension between the “intelligibility of being” and the limits of human cognition (88). Cantor’s inquiry challenges us to see how we can reconcile the alleged intelligibility of being with limitations of human fallibility. One may wonder, however, if this concern arises from Parmenides himself or from a kind of postmodern deconstruction.

In “A Parmenidean Self-Exegesis” (91-112), David Sedley explores the possibility that Parmenides published a version of his poem with his own commentary attached. Simplicius reports a commentary on Parmenides’ poem that purports to come from the poet-philosopher himself (Phys. 31.3-7). Although earlier editors had dismissed the supposed source as deriving from a scholium, Sedley defends it, citing Plato’s Sophist as supporting evidence for a Parmenidean prose commentary.

Focusing on what Parmenides allegedly says about his two morphai, Sedley cites “Hesiod’s first and most fundamental dualistic division of the…cosmos” as “Sky and Earth” (105). It is this division that Parmenides latched onto with his Light and Night. But, Sedley warns, these two forms should not be taken (as mortals take them) as “a pair of compresent contraries” but as “alternating contradictories” (108). Parmenides’ language suggests that the properties associated with Light are real, while those associated with Night are mere names (109-110). His commentary reveals “a radical asymmetry between the two antithetical cosmic principles that mortals have distinguished” (111). Sedley gives us a great deal to think of in terms of the “self-exegesis” of Parmenides. But this account would, it seems to me, drive a stake into the heart of empirical astronomy by undermining the very important role of opaque mass and shadow that mark Parmenides’ great discovery of the moon as a dark sphere reflecting the sun’s light (a feature emphasized by Karl Popper).

In “The Value of Perception in Parmenides” (113-29) Jenny Bryan argues that fragments B6 and B7 “represent neither an outright rejection…nor a demotion of sense perception”; “Parmenides is concerned with the way that we perceive and communicate rather than with what we perceive or with how we think about our perceptions” (113, emphasis in original). Examining B6 and B7, she points out that the goddess warns not only against failed perception, but against false speaking because of a tendency to conflate what-is and what-is-not. She finds that the

analysis of fragment B8.53-9…indicates that [mortals’] failure results from the decision to perceive the cosmos in a manner that incorporates what-is-not. They are blind, deaf, and mute because they do not perceive or communicate what-is as it is. (125, emphasis in original)

Bryan admits it is difficult “to identify an example of successful perception within the poem” (125). She suggests that Parmenides, like Xenophanes, might have had in mind other modes of perception that did not involve what-is-not. The alternative, however, remains elusive. Bryan is right to warn us against assigning to Parmenides a rejection of sense perception per se.

André Laks confronts the problem of being in “Parmenides and Mortality: A Proposal” (130-49). Reviewing recent studies on Parmenides, he reminds us of Barnes’ claim that Parmenides did not argue for a monistic conclusion and of Patricia Curd’s argument that Parmenides advocated a “predicational monism” that in principle allows for a pluralism of kinds of entities.

Laks follows Jean Bollack in interpreting the goddess’ statement at B8.53-54 as objecting to the positing not of two forms, but of two gnōmai, “ideas” or “thoughts”; the idea that the goddess wants to preclude is that of non-being (140). Mortals should recognize the two forms they posit as both being onta (141). The method discussed in the Doxa should be viewed not as a third way, but as an application of the right way, one that is eoikōs, “appropriate” and in conformity with the way things are (145-46, 130). Laks offers an attractive solution to the tension between the first and second parts of Parmenides’ poems. On this account, the first part presents a semantic or essentialist account of what-is, rather than what we might call a full-blown ontology; the second part presents an application of that account with a dualistic ontology which avoids the introduction of non-being.

In “Beyond the Doxa: The Third Part of the Goddess’ Speech in Parmenides’ Poem” (150-73), Massimo Pulpito addresses the connection between the first and second parts of the poem. The problem is, “if the second discourse concerns others’ opinions without truth, why devote such meticulous [and extensive] attention to those opinions?” (153). He helpfully notes that in the poem we find “two major families of interpretation on the subject”, one collecting “readings that strongly assert the incompatibility between the two discourses”, and another with “readings that admit of some degree of compatibility between the two discourses” (153, emphasis in original).

In B1.31-32, the goddess promises to show “how things believed [dokounta] should have been believable [dokimōs], completely penetrating through all things” (156-59). Besides the transition from the first to the second discourse in B8.50-52, Pulpito sees another transition at B8.60-61, which promises to explain how the “ordering of things” is “completely fitting” so that mortal opinions will never “outstrip you” (159-60). There are grounds for recognizing a third discourse here, one that is not Doxa, but Diakosmos (165). Of the two forms, Light and Night, we should not see the latter as non-being. Both forms have demas and dunameis, “material structure” and “powers”, so that “nothingness partakes in neither” (B9.4) (168-68). In the end, the incompatibilists are right to say the Doxa proper is incompatible with the Truth; the compatibilists are right insofar as the Cosmic Ordering, the third discourse, is compatible with the Truth (171). Pulpito offers a vigorous defense of Parmenides’ cosmology by separating it from the Doxa proper by basing it only on ontological principles derived from the first part of the poem.

Mathilde Brémond examines the structure of Eleatic arguments in “Gorgias’ Antilogical Arguments and the Reception of the Eleatics” (174-92). Many reconstructions by ancient commentators of Eleatic arguments take the form of an “antilogy”: “1) For φ to be true, either ψ or not-ψ must be true; 2) ψ is impossible; 3) not-ψ is impossible; 4) Hence, φ is false” (174). When we compare the reconstructions with the original texts, however, we find that they lack the opposition of ψ and not-ψ. The opposition can be traced to Gorgias’ treatise On Not-Being. Gorgias’ reading of the Eleatics, including Xenophanes, influenced Plato, as seen in the Parmenides, and Aristotle in his own reconstructions of Eleatic arguments. Aristotle passed this interpretation on to later commentators, and the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias preserves and promotes this view. Brémond’s study is a valuable corrective to a tendency to project antilogies back onto the Eleatics, when in reality the argument form arises from Gorgias’ rhetoric.

The essays in this collection deal with a wide range of topics offering valuable insights into the poem of Parmenides and the theory it expresses. Several of the essays offer different approaches to the relationship between the first part of the poem with its monistic approach and the second (and third?) part(s) with a dualistic cosmology, but it continues to require clarification. Parmenides’ poem marks a historical turning point in philosophy. It was only in the twentieth century that Parmenides’ impact on philosophical development became clear; the twenty-first century is still struggling to clarify what precisely his message was, and how it was received by Parmenides’ successors.

Parmenides’ cosmology presented for the first time three new insights that turned out to constitute scientific breakthroughs: that the Morning Star is identical to the Evening Star, the moon gets its light from the sun, and the earth is spherical in shape.^[1] Parmenides thus managed to achieve what earlier natural philosophers had sought but never attained: correct scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Whatever he meant to accomplish, Parmenides presented a paradigm for later cosmological theories. He provided not only a turning point for philosophy, but also a starting point for empirical science, specifically, that of astronomy.

The present work offers a rich reflection on the language, thought, and theory of Parmenides of Elea. It reminds us that the paradox that was Parmenides still remains to be resolved.

REFERENCES

D. W. Graham, Science Before Socrates (Oxford: 2013).

While such an articulation of our current state of emergency may not be especially controversial, her proposed solution—a radical curtailment of various personal liberties—most certainly is. In Part I (“Theory”), Conly draws out the theoretical basis of her argument for the instrumental value of liberty. In Part II (“Applications”), she offers analyses of particular cases in which limitations on personal liberty might prove especially essential (environmental ethics, medical ethics, and the ethics of self-expression) before turning (with astonishing brevity, one feels) to addressing possible concerns.

The crux of Conly’s main argument is as follows. Liberty is only valuable as a means, not as an end-in-itself. Put simply, “some liberties have instrumental value, and no liberty has intrinsic value” (5). Since each liberty is only as sacred as its outcome is useful, we as a polis should pick and choose which liberties to value. For a liberty to have instrumental value, according to Conly, it must produce a valuable end; it must be the best means for reaching that end; and the value of the end that liberty produces must outweigh the disvalue it may also produce.

At first glance, this line of reasoning seems to run contrary to our popular rhetoric and unexamined political intuitions, which tend to take liberty to be a universal good. But Conly argues that, if we’re thinking carefully about our commitments, we already tend to share her assumption. She thinks that the widespread acceptability of such an assumption becomes especially clear in moments when we imagine liberties coming to conflict with one another: for instance, since a reasonable person wouldn’t believe that one’s liberty to move about at will extends to walking uninvited through someone else’s house, the reasonable person is already implicitly committed to the idea that not all liberties are valuable (and/or that liberties cease to be valuable when they stop having desirable outcomes). As such, Conly takes herself to be making a descriptive rather than a normative claim: it’s not that we should think of liberty as instrumental, but that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we already do think of liberty as instrumental.

Having established that liberty is only as valuable as its outcomes, Conly turns to three domains—environmental ethics, medical ethics, and the ethics of self-expression—in order to argue that many of the liberties we take to be inalienable in those areas are generating either neutral or profoundly harmful outcomes. Let me share a representative example. In Chapter 3 (“Environmental Ethics”), Conly notes that ‘what we eat’ and ‘how many children we have’ have historically been considered personal liberties that ought not to be externally limited. Conly argues, “[at] one point in time, these were liberties that did no harm, but now they are liberties which do far more harm than good, and we should give them up” (69).

Setting aside for a moment some serious doubt about the historical harmlessness clause, a reader might be dubious that mandating certain diets or reproductive practices will indeed ‘do more good than harm’. But Conly’s argument here is a fundamentally consequentialist one: even if a particular individual will be worse off not eating meat (say, because of her chronic anemia) or worse off having fewer children (say, because she lives in a culture where familial bonds are paramount), the human race in the aggregate will have a better chance at surviving anthropogenic climate change by minimizing, e.g., the deforestation that comes with raising livestock and the resource depletion that come with rising populations.

Of course, Conly grants that it would be far preferable for individuals to willingly give up their chances at a steak or a second child. But voluntary action is a luxury that we cannot necessarily afford under conditions of crisis. For Conly: “We need to assure that a large number of people will make the changes that we need, and if we need to do that by restructuring their liberty to consume as they like or to procreate as they like, that is morally permissible” (71). Notice that, for Conly, moral permissibility tracks not only usefulness, but a particular kind of usefulness assessed at the population-level.

If a reader does not already share Conly’s explicitly consequentialist commitments, she is unlikely to find much value in her arguments surrounding the curtailment of various liberties. But even if a reader is an avowed consequentialist, she still has good reasons to hesitate in accepting Conly’s conclusions. Consider an argument that appears in another of the application sections, Chapter 5 (“The Ethics of Self-Expression”). Conly invokes John Stuart Mill to propose that we continue to allow evaluative claims that push the boundaries of societal acceptability, while arguing that “we should restrict claims about facts where they are demonstrably false and harmful” (157).

So denigrating the intelligence or capability of a certain racial or gender group? Acceptable, if only because limiting evaluative claims—even obscene or offensive ones—is generally frowned upon in democracy. But declaring, e.g., that ‘Barack Obama is not a citizen’ is not acceptable (1) because it is demonstrably false and (2) bringing demonstrably false claims into the public discourse is harmful. My marginal notes near this argument are the same as my marginal notes in nearly every other section of Conly’s book: who gets to decide? Who gets to decide what claims are ‘demonstrably false’, especially in an infodemic, post-truth, post-factual society?^[1] One can imagine a distressingly near future in which tools such as UMA’s Optimistic Oracle, described on its website as a “decentralized truth machine” largely meant to support prediction markets, function as the keepers of AI-powered hedonic calculi, such that at some point, the question stops being ‘is X true?’ and starts being ‘would it be useful if X were true?’.

The question of ‘who gets to decide?’ is never adequately addressed, let alone answered, over the course of the book. Conly’s implicit answer seems to be, “We will! The polis!” But if the broader political community is not consulted in the legislative curtailment of their liberties, it is difficult to imagine that they will be consulted on the long-term priorities of humanity. Of course, some trade-offs are necessary in all liberal democratic politics: one can’t always get what one wants if it comes into conflict with the greater good. I think it is possible both to accept this axiom and to register some serious concern with Conly’s formulation of it.

To Conly’s credit, she is explicit that her picture of what it might look like to ‘limit liberty’ could entail all manner of practices that don’t look like armed agents of the state overtly enforcing their will. After all, our liberty in some grocery check-out lines to use plastic bags is limited when the store has only paper bags available, and few thoughtful people would call this a grotesque overstep of regulation. These ‘soft’ limitations on liberty might make sense when we’re talking about how to carry our groceries home, but arguably such a case is not morally congruent with limitations on our liberty to, e.g., accept or reject certain medical interventions. When Conly writes that “[mandating] a treatment against the will of a patient can be appropriate and morally acceptable… [if it] is being done for a sufficiently good reason” (125), it is difficult to see why a concept as vague and open to manipulation such as “a sufficiently good reason” couldn’t result in all number of horrors (including forced birth, forced sterilization, and so on). If we were being truly devout consequentialists, we might even say that the net bads of living in a society that has the power to override a liberty as dear as, e.g., bodily autonomy, would outweigh any goods that come from doing so.

There are many other aspects of Conly’s project that a reader might find unconvincing: her focus on the survival of the humans species as the main (perhaps only) goal worth attending to; her assumption that since liberty as a type may not be intrinsically valuable, all particular tokens of liberty are likewise not intrinsically valuable; her apparent belief that mere vigilance and good intentions would be enough to keep a project of mass-liberty-curtailment from drifting into persecutory fascism.

At base, though, Conly’s project is unconvincing precisely because her responses to potential worries are so perfunctory. In the two whole paragraphs that she dedicates to addressing “Fear of the Slippery Slope”, Conly puts the onus of resisting unjust liberty-curtailing regulations (or regulations with bad outcomes) on individual members of the political community, who “should do something to bring about a reconsideration” (198). In other words, the burden of fighting unjust liberty limitations is placed on members of the political community whose consent to the initial limitation is neither requested nor required. If the history of social justice has taught us anything, it is that those political actors who will be forced to take up battles of advocacy and rights-protection will be the marginalized: the poor, the queer, the non-white, the non-male, the dis-abled who must once again challenge a hierarchy of powerful policy-makers with the audacity to declare in one voice, I know what’s good for you better than you do.

In a different political moment, this project might merely be unconvincing. In this political moment, it also borders on irresponsible.

REFERENCES

Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (Second Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2024).

It is against this backdrop that Benjamin Miller presents the argument of his book Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy. Whereas many Aristotelians and neo-Aristotelians trot along their merry way, invoking ideas from Aristotle as they shape contemporary character education initiatives, Miller demands that these educators slow down and consider whether this path is in fact one they ought to be following. His book considers a simple but too often unasked question: Is Aristotelian character education actually compatible with liberal democracy?

Miller’s answer to this question is a firm “no”. His basic argument is as follows:

1. Either we can practice Aristotelian character education, or we can support liberalism, but we cannot do both.

2. We ought to support liberalism.

3. Therefore, we must not practice Aristotelian character education.

Against Aristotelian Character Education focuses primarily on establishing the truth of the disjunctive first premise; in other words, Miller’s main concern is to demonstrate the incompatibility of Aristotelian (and also any variety of neo-Aristotelian) character education with liberal democracy. Although, as Miller acknowledges, there are some thinkers who argue that the second premise is false (in other words, that we should give up on liberalism), he notes that most people who endorse some version of Aristotle-inspired character education also consider themselves to be staunchly in favor of liberalism. “Liberalism is the bedrock justification for civil liberties” (240) writes Miller; therefore, giving up on liberalism means giving up on “the types of personal freedom and equality that characterizes [sic] democracies around the world today” (41). This, he thinks, is not a bullet even most die-hard Aristotelians would be willing to bite.

Miller’s argument for the truth of the first premise above divides into two main steps. In the first half of the book, through some careful exegetical work focused on the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics, Miller seeks to establish that, for Aristotle, being virtuous involves what he calls an “extensive knowledge requirement”. This extensive knowledge requirement takes the form of a “specifiable, detailed, and complete value theory” (43), which includes a correct conception of the best human life. Expressed negatively, the extensive knowledge requirement says that it is impossible to be virtuous without extensive knowledge of what is objectively valuable in the world, in what order those things are valuable, and why those things are valuable.

Miller offers three separate arguments in support of the extensive knowledge requirement. First, he surveys what Aristotle explicitly has to say about the knowledge needed for virtue, making a presumptive case for the truth of the extensive knowledge requirement. Second, turning to Eudemian Ethics 8.3 and Politics 2.9, he examines Aristotle’s critique of the Spartan regime in order to show that extensive ethical knowledge is required for virtue—the Spartan regime failed because the Spartans “get the order of the value hierarchy wrong” (96), which means that the Spartans are wrong about what it means to flourish as a human being. And third, Miller argues that extensive political knowledge is required for virtue because, for Aristotle, political expertise and practical wisdom are exactly the same thing: “the fully virtuous person must have extensive knowledge related to politics to be virtuous, because this knowledge is part of practical wisdom” (111).

Miller’s argument here relies on the way in which practical wisdom is an integral feature of Aristotle’s virtue theory. Miller’s interpretive argument is compelling, and in my view, one of the most significant contributions in this first part of the book is the way in which he reveals how many scholars within Aristotle studies “are at least implicitly committed” to the extensive knowledge requirement, even though they often leave this commitment unstated or even seek to deny it (79).

Miller’s main audience, however, is not other scholars of Aristotelian texts. Rather, he makes a point of identifying his intended audience as those who seek to apply Aristotelian thought to the sphere of education (4). It is to this audience that he turns in the second half of the book, addressing this question: If we’re going to do some version of Aristotelian character education, what must we necessarily import along with it? Must we also endorse the extensive knowledge requirement? Miller offers a resounding “yes!”, claiming that his main goal for the non-specialist applicators of Aristotle in his audience is “to recognize that the Aristotelian theory of virtue, even modernized versions of it, are inexorably committed to the view that Aristotelian virtues require Aristotelian values” (44). Miller argues that, if contemporary character educators want to hang onto the most attractive features of Aristotle’s theory—his focus on human flourishing and his integration of practical wisdom—then they too must endorse something along the lines of the extensive knowledge requirement for virtue.

The problem, of course, is that endorsing the extensive knowledge requirement is exactly the thing that makes Aristotelian character education incompatible with liberalism. The extensive knowledge requirement ought to make Aristotelian character education a non-starter for anyone committed to liberalism because of the way in which liberalism involves endorsement of two central features, pluralism and antipaternalism, both of which stem from and are necessary for liberalism’s commitment to equality and freedom. Pluralism, according to Miller, is “the idea that there are many different and incompatible ways of living a good human life” (152), and antipaternalism is “the idea that the government should not forcibly impose ways of valuing, believing, and living on its citizens using the argument that the government knows better than the citizens what is best for them” (152).

But, because “Aristotelian virtues require Aristotelian values”, practicing Aristotelian character education involves affirming and educating students into one and only one ultimate vision of the good life. Therefore, Aristotelian character education cannot allow for pluralism. Similarly, any attempts at this sort of character education will necessarily involve imposing ways of valuing on people that they themselves have not chosen. Therefore, Aristotelian character education violates the principle of antipaternalism. As a result, Aristotelian character education undermines equality and freedom and has no place in a liberal society.

Miller argues that even the best recent attempts to avoid these pitfalls fail to do so; he considers Kristjánsson’s (2015) ACE theory and Curren’s (2013) Aristotelian necessities theory as two influential examples. There are at least two ways in which neo-Aristotelian character educators might try to escape the strong demands of the extensive knowledge requirement. First, they might seek to “soften” the contents of Aristotelian value theory, hedging on what exactly constitutes “human flourishing”. This approach is an attempt to deny that the knowledge required for virtue must be extensive and is at the heart of the “thick but vague” strategy, which tries to present a conception of human flourishing that is thick (so that it can ground character education) but also vague (so that it can accommodate various understandings of the good life).

Miller’s contention is that gutting a conception of the good human life enough to make it compatible with liberalism requires us to give up on thinking about the good human life in terms of objective “flourishing” because of the way in which that flourishing, within an Aristotelian framework, depends on having extensive knowledge of what a good human life is. But backing away from the centrality of human flourishing undermines Aristotelian character education both by making it unfeasible (it depends on an appeal to flourishing) and by undermining one central motivation for pursuing it in the first place, which is to help people flourish as human beings.

The second way in which character educators who want to hold onto an Aristotelian approach might resist Miller’s argument is by rejecting the claim that knowledge of value is a requirement for virtue. If we need not convey knowledge of value to students in order to engage in character education, then we need not violate the principles of pluralism and antipaternalism, because we are not telling anybody what they ought to care about or believe. Miller argues that this sort of strategy likewise fails because to say that virtue does not require knowledge is to completely undermine the virtue of practical wisdom, which is a type of knowledge about value.

There are two main consequences of this strategy: first, practical wisdom is the virtue that makes all the other Aristotelian virtues possible, so throwing it out makes Aristotelian character education impossible; and second, practical wisdom is the other main feature of Aristotle’s approach that makes him so attractive, so throwing it out makes Aristotelian character education much less appealing. The upshot of the second half of the book is that Miller attacks Aristotelian character education where it hurts most: he shows how two of its most attractive features—a focus on human flourishing and the centrality of practical wisdom—are the very things that make it incompatible with liberalism and the very things that must be abandoned by anyone who is committed to supporting liberal democracy.

Miller’s argument is clear and compelling, and his book enters into a conversation that is crucial to continue within the field of character education. Against Aristotelian Character Education, nevertheless, leaves several important questions hanging. These questions do not undermine Miller’s project in this particular book—in fact, the two I bring up here are ones he notes that he does not have the time or space to address fully—but I raise them here in the spirit of continuing the conversation where Miller leaves off.

First, Miller notes early on that his argument is meant to apply only to public education (35). Private education, insofar as it is not mandatory, does not run the risk of undermining liberalism in the same way that state-sponsored public education does. Although Miller makes it clear that this is not his area of concern, it is an area that is worthy of exploration with respect to Miller’s argument, especially given that many Aristotle-inspired character education initiatives do happen in private educational contexts. Does Miller’s argument against Aristotelian character education undermine the projects of these contexts too?

Second, Miller’s suggestion at the end of the book is to shift the focus of character educators to the cultivation of “civic virtues”, especially civic virtues that “can help to mediate potential conflicts between citizens’ personal worldviews and their commitments to democratic freedom and equality” (31). Miller is sure to point out that his recommendations here are, in many senses, preliminary, and I agree that fleshing them out is a project beyond the scope of this current book. Nevertheless, I was left wondering about how exactly Miller conceives of “civic virtue” and whether such a virtue—especially one that mediates “potential conflicts” between personal worldviews and commitments to freedom and equality—could itself escape the demand of some sort of extensive knowledge requirement regarding a value hierarchy.

Against Aristotelian Character Education deserves the careful attention of both Aristotle scholars and those who seek to apply Aristotelian insights to the sphere of education. Aristotle interpreters, translators, and applicators alike should take note and seriously consider Miller’s challenge to interrogate more closely the commitments that underlie the work of character education.

REFERENCES

Curren, Randall, 2013, “A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Education, Justice, and the Human Good,” Theory and Research in Education, 11 (3): 231-249.

Harrison, Tom, 2023, “Welcome,” The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. University of Birmingham. https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/about/welcome/

Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. (2022). The Jubilee Centre Framework for Character Education in Schools (3^rdedition). University of Birmingham. https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The-Jubilee-Centre-Framework-for-Character-Education-in-Schools.pdf

Kristjánsson, Kristján, 2015, Aristotelian Character Education, New York: Routledge.

Chapter 1 focuses on drawing two contrasts. According to the first contrast, philosophers typically tend to believe both (i) that there is a single, objectively correct morality, and (ii) that certain moral virtues, concepts, ideals, and institutions which reflect that morality are universal. Philosophers are also here presented as holding that universal, objectively correct moral principles can be discovered merely by considering abstract thought-examples, such as the famous trolley problem.

By contrast, a minority of dissenting philosophers and most social scientists are introduced as taking seriously the fact that there is a wide variety of local moralities embedded in different traditions, cultures, and religions. From this second perspective, what for most philosophers seems objectively correct and eternal appears to be the result of contingent factors, such as one’s education and upbringing. This insight then leads to a worthy scientific project of studying the many moralities that exist in the real world. This chapter also introduces the contrast between the Humean view, according to which all humans share the same underlying nature consisting of shared motivations, principles, and behaviours, and the opposing Herderian view, according to which there are very different ways of flourishing as a human, based on moral concepts and beliefs that differ from culture to culture.

Chapter 2 is on the difficult demarcation problem, the question of what makes something count as ‘moral’ or ‘morality’ in the first place. In this chapter, Lukes traces the historical origins of the words ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ back to Ancient Greece and Rome, and he also explores how these words have been recently used in English and other European languages. This chapter, furthermore, outlines a view according to which morality is not merely one source of competing practical requirements amongst many (prudential, legal, and the like). Rather, in a wider sense, morality is here argued to be an all-encompassing central perspective of inner life, a moral point of view, from which the relative priority of all other considerations is judged. In this sense, morality is an ineliminable part of human life, which means that all sceptical attempts to reject its demands merely end up confirming its importance. On this view, then, there is no separate domain of morality, but rather morality in its different forms pervades inescapably all human life.

Chapter 3 draws on both philosophy and sciences (psychology, economics, anthropology, biology, and several other fields) to explore further how different forms of inquiry can help us to solve the previous demarcation problem. Inspired by Levinas, Strawson, and Darwall, the chapter first focuses on the kind of reciprocal recognition that is uniquely present in human interactions. Based on the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, it then describes how the behaviour of many animals displays ‘proto-morality’, including elements of good-naturedness, reciprocity, revenge, helping, kindness, soothing, and fairness. The chapter also examines various suggestions about how human morality transcends earlier forms of proto‑moralities found in non‑human animals. These suggestions include widening moral concern to the community as a whole, accountability, collective intentionality and action, perspective-taking and Smithian projective empathy that requires considering both how others feel and should feel, rules that are unalterable by agreement, normative self-governance, the capacity to question social conventions, and moral universalism and the recognition of universal human dignity.

Chapter 4 then turns to mass atrocities. It thus examines the extent to which human beings can resist authority and problematic social norms under extreme social conditions, and thereby also how philosophical, sociological, and psychological research can help us to make sense of the darkest episodes in human history. This chapter begins with Zygmunt Bauman’s description of how modern bureaucracies and industrial organisations can undermine pre-social human morality, and with Hannah Arendt’s famous discussion of the banality of evil. It then explains how three famous experiments (the Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and the Princeton Theological Seminary experiment) led to a situational consensus, with the adoption of the view that external factors are decisive in explaining human behaviour. It was thus commonly thought that anyone could become a perpetrator under the right circumstances.

Lukes questions this consensus by arguing that the situations individuals face are also shaped by their inner dispositions, which themselves have been formed by previous situations. Because of this, it is not clear that you would act in the same way as many Germans did during the Second World War, given that you have not been brought up by authoritarian parents or been subjected to similar state propaganda (and even if you had been, you would now be a different person). This chapter also contains fascinating discussions of the rescuers who actively created opportunities and relied on the language of universal solidarity, the debate in the Journal of Perpetrator Research on whether thick concepts such as ‘perpetrator’ and ‘rescuer’ should be used to assign responsibility within scientific explanations, and how the conception of morality the Nazis had relates to our morality.

Chapter 5 understands values as what we see as important, desirable, and justifiable to ourselves and others. It then espouses value pluralism, the view that there are many different values that are neither reducible to one another nor to some ‘super-value’. These values can furthermore be incommensurable, incompatible, and even irreconcilable. Much of this chapter then focuses on describing and comparing Isaiah Berlin’s and Max Weber’s versions of value pluralism. It also discusses empirical sociological research concerning the similarities and differences between people’s values globally. Even if this research is often recognised to be methodologically problematic, it seems to support the idea of a pan-cultural consensus. For example, values such as benevolence, self-direction, self-fulfilment, friendship, family, and treating human life as precious are almost universally regarded as more important than power, tradition, position, and things. Despite these similarities in values, there is, however, also considerable evidence that cultural practices vary significantly across societies. One appealing explanation for this is that the same values can be realised and enacted in different ways in different cultural contexts.

The concluding Chapter 6 begins by locating common ground between the Humean and Herderian positions. According to Lukes, Hume was correct that human nature is universally shared; however, the shared capacities are precisely those that enable the cultural diversity highlighted by Herder. This chapter also explores the fascinating question of how we are to determine whether some behaviour counts as realising a shared value or a different value altogether. When, according to Herodotus, the Callatians famously ate their dead, were they honouring them or desecrating them?

According to Lukes, answering such questions requires Smithian empathy, drawing on our reason, emotions, and judgment when attempting to occupy the perspective of others. In this way, our own interpretative horizon, which is based on our values, sets the limits of intelligibility of others’ behaviour. Therefore, the demarcation problem can only be answered from “somewhere”, rather than from the impersonal view from nowhere. The failure to recognise this, furthermore, leads only to insensibility, coldness, and blindness. The book finally concludes with a brief coda on the recent threat of political polarisation and how democratic deliberation could function as an antidote to it.

The best way I can describe The Diversity of Morals as a book is to compare it to a mosaic or a mix tape, in both good and bad ways. The book certainly exhibits Lukes’s extensive and nuanced understanding of both historical and contemporary literatures across a broad array of disciplines. This makes the book an excellent resource for philosophers who want to learn about how morality has been understood in social and human sciences. Synthesising material from multiple disciplines to create a broader picture is, furthermore, itself illuminating, as it often highlights both novel contrasts and how research from different fields can complement and support one another in new ways. Some of the described research is also especially fascinating, such as political scientist Scott Straus’s work on the conditions under which genocide tends to happen (105–6; Straus 2006). Lukes’s synthesising approach in the book, however, also has its downsides. In describing different views, Lukes mainly relies on extensive quotations, which makes reading the book unnecessarily cumbersome and leaves less room for critical analysis, rigorous argumentation, or development of the author’s own original views.

Finally, from a philosopher’s perspective, the book also contains some, well, philosophical problems. Let me conclude by raising just two of them. First, I am not fully convinced by the claim that morality is not just one normative domain amongst many, but rather an overall perspective of practical reason from which the weight of the competing considerations from other domains must be judged (28, 40–3). Consider Marcia Baron’s (1991, 855–6) example in which your own child is in a long queue waiting for an urgent lifesaving surgery. In this case, to give your child a better chance of survival, you would be able to pull the strings in the hospital to reschedule the surgery for next week (so that your child would not need to wait two or three months). Here, it seems clear to me that morality, whatever it consists of either objectively or within our culture, forbids you to move your child up the queue. After all, the other children in the queue are exactly in the same position as your own child, and so you could not justify pulling the strings for them on any reasonable grounds. It is not, however, obvious that, despite this, you still should not pull the strings, all things considered. This, thus, appears to be an exceptionally rare situation in which moral requirements are outweighed by considerations arising from your relationship with your child. This case, therefore, suggests that morality is not the overall practical perspective from which the weight of different values is evaluated. Rather, it seems more plausible to think that there is an overall perspective of practical reason from which moral reasons and values can be recognised as especially weighty considerations amongst many other, often less significant values.

The second philosophical issue I want to raise concerns the book’s interpretation of Hume. Based on the famous quote from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in which Hume emphasised the similarities between the motives with which people act across different nations and ages, Lukes (168) ends up with the following interpretation of Hume: “Hume’s was a view of the human world from nowhere within it. It was a conception of objective knowledge that abstracts from the forms of perception and actions characteristic of humans”. This reading seems to ignore the fact that, according to Hume, almost everything we are aware of in the world is a projection of human sentiments, including causal connections, external objects, personal identity, morality, and aesthetic qualities. For Hume, thus, if you take away human sentiments and sensitivities, there is nothing worth calling objective knowledge left—there is no world as it would appear from a view from nowhere.

Furthermore, if one reads Hume on morality with care, it becomes clear that, for him, virtue cannot be recognised independently of the forms of perception characteristic of human beings. Rather, in his view, our human passions enable us to see certain character traits as virtuous. As Hume himself puts it (EM 9.12),

It must be…allowed that every quality of mind, which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others, communicates a pleasure to the spectator, engages his esteem, and is admitted under the honourable denomination of virtue or merit.

Yet, despite these two philosophical issues—and a few others like them—I want to conclude by emphasising that The Diversity of Morals is well worth reading for any philosopher interested in how other disciplines, especially the social sciences, have sought to make sense of many key aspects of morality.

REFERENCES

M. Baron 1991. “Impartiality and Friendship,” Ethics. 101: 836–857.

D. Hume 1998 [1751]. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

S. Straus 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Ruanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

These knock-down arguments are said to emerge from Fiocco’s fundamentalist approach to metaphysics, which he calls “original inquiry”. This inquiry is occasioned by confronting the world (“all this”), and it aims to answer the question “What is all this?” without taking anything for granted. Such a presuppositionless inquiry is said to permit us to “move past stalemate in metaphysical discussions” (22) and to lead us to the undeniable truth about time and the world, which includes Fiocco’s two theses.

To make progress with original inquiry, Fiocco thinks that we first need to address the fundamental ontological question “What is a thing?” (11). As he clarifies, “a thing is just an entity, an existent, a being” (60). Many philosophers will doubt that anything interesting can be said about things, in this general sense, that goes beyond the trivial observation that things are whatever quantifiers range over and singular terms denote. Fiocco disagrees. For him, elucidating the notion of thinghood is the most important question in metaphysics, and what ultimately leads to his two main theses.

Original inquiry provides Fiocco with the theoretical framework for a rich and wide-ranging discussion that spans almost the entire breadth of contemporary metaphysics. There is far more material in this book than one can hope to cover in a short review. Instead of saying a little bit about many different topics, I think it might be more helpful to focus on Fiocco’s main arguments for his two theses, which are contained in two very short passages on p. 77 and p. 179, respectively. The nothing-explains-anything argument on p. 77 promotes a radical restriction on the possibility of explanation; the farrago argument on p. 179 advocates a novel objection to eternalist thesis that past, present, and future are equally real.

My plan for this review is to give a detailed exposition of these two pivotal arguments, plus a quick survey of the rest of the book.

No Thing Explains Any Thing (p. 77)

After spending the first seventy pages on a leisurely (and somewhat repetitive) exposition of original inquiry, Fiocco’s answer to the fundamental ontological question arises quite suddenly. On p. 73, he tells us that things are the ontological bases of explanations for the diversity in the world (“all this”). As it is given to us, the world is not uniform. The function of things is to explain this diversity. This might sound quite innocent, but the subsequent discussion reveals that Fiocco’s view is not that things can explain but that they must explain for them to count as things at all. It is not obvious how an original inquirer, who is not supposed to assume anything, arrives at this view. Why can’t there be terminal explananda that are explained by other things but do not explain anything themselves?

A few pages later, we discover that Fiocco holds a much more radical view. He does not merely deny the existence of terminal explananda, which would be the end points of chains of explanations, he claims that there cannot be any chains of explanation at all because no thing can be explained by any other thing:

If how an entity, e, [is] were explicable (in its entirety) in terms of some other thing, e itself would be ontologically idle, making no contribution per se to how the world is; such an “entity” would, if anything, merely be a manifestation of the latter, that genuine existent. Hence, if there were something that made e how “it” is, e’s contribution to how the world is would be made by that thing that wholly determines or makes e how e is. Yet if e “itself” were not capable of contributing to a partial explanation for how all this is as it is, if “it” per se were insufficient to do at least this, e would be no thing at all. “It” could in principle make no contribution to the world and, therefore, is literally, nothing. (77)

It is not immediately clear whether the view is that an explanatory redundant e cannot exist or that it cannot be a thing. This issue gets settled a little bit later, in Section 4.2, where Fiocco argues that the world is not a thing because all this is explained by all the things there are, and we are supposed to have learned on p. 77 that no thing is explained by any other thing. This is an unexpected discovery. The world is the starting point of original inquiry and denying its existence is not a viable option. So how can it, the world, fail to be a thing? Fiocco does not seem to be using ‘thing’ in the liberal sense that he advertised earlier, when he told us that “a thing is just an entity, an existent, a being” (60). Since the world exists, it is presumably an “existent”, yet Fiocco explicitly denies that it is a thing. To make sense of Fiocco’s theory of thinghood, it appears that ‘no thing’ cannot mean the same as ‘nothing’, the negated existential quantifier (¬∃).

Even if we restrict ourselves to every thing (rather than everything), we might wonder why explanatory redundance entails non-thinghood. Suppose that d explains e and that e explains part of the diversity in all this. Assuming the transitivity of explanation, the presence of d would render the intermediate e explanatorily redundant. But this does not change the fact that e also explains part of all this. Compare the case of logical entailment. If p entails q and q entails r, then q is logically redundant in the sense that p already entails r on its own. But this does not change the fact q also entails r. So what mistake would an original inquirer make if she concluded that—despite its explanatory redundance—e still qualifies as a thing because it does perform what Fiocco has identified as the essential function of things, which is to explain all this? In other words, why doesn’t the fact that d performs the same explanatory role merely show that d and e are both things? Fiocco’s very short argument does not address this question.

In the second paragraph on p. 77, Fiocco presents another argument for the thesis that “no thing can be made to be by something else”. There, he argues as follows. Suppose for the sake of reductio that x explains the existence of y, and that “x makes to be y” (as Fiocco puts it). For x and y to stand in the makes-to-be relation to each other, both need to exist, which means that the existence of y is a pre-condition of its standing in this relation. Hence it cannot be by entering into the makes-to-be relation that y exists. Fiocco concludes that the existence of y cannot be determined by x. No thing is made to be by another thing.

Fatema Amijee (2026) objects that there is no reason why this argument needs to be restricted to every thing rather than to everything. If the argument succeeds at all, then it also shows that nothing explains anything, and not just that no thing explains any thing. We would get the conclusion that explanation is impossible, including the explanation of the diversity in all this that is supposed to be the hallmark of things. (See Fiocco 2026 for a reply to Amijee.)

While Fiocco focusses on grounding explanations, his argument would apply equally well to causal explanations. Consider your relation to your parents. Since nobody is a parent without any children, your existence is a pre-condition to anyone bearing the parent-relation to you. But it does not follow from this that you do not owe your existence to your parents or that your existence is somehow inexplicable. The parent-relation merely reflects the fact that your parents made you. The relation did not create you; your parents did. Friends of ontological levels might reply in the same way to Fiocco’s argument against grounding. What makes it the case that y exists is the existence of its ground x, not x’s standing in the makes-to-be relation to y. Nobody claims that the makes-to-be relation makes y; what makes to be y is x. The ground is doing the grounding, not the grounding relation. Perhaps there is more to be said about these issues, but Fiocco does not elaborate. The entire nothing-explains-anything argument, which is the linchpin of his view on ontology, occurs on the single page p. 77.

The Farrago Argument (p. 179)

Fiocco’s account of the nature of time emerges in Chapters 5–11 as a corollary of his broader views about original inquiry and the fundamental ontological question. Section 5.3 argues that we must distinguish time and moments, and that the former generates the latter: “Time is a thing in the world, the necessarily existing substance that enables change by yielding the moments that it requires” (135). Over the next one hundred and eighty pages, these ideas get turned into a theory of time that Fiocco calls ‘transient presentism’.

While developing his positive view, Fiocco touches on countless other issues in the philosophy of time, but most of this discussion is really an intramural debate amongst different versions of presentism. The main rival to all versions of presentism—the eternalist view that past, present, and future are equally real—gets dispatched with a quick argument that starts at the bottom of p. 179 and that is as pivotal to Fiocco’s views about time as the nothing-explains-anything argument is to his views about ontology. This “farrago argument” combines a reflection on how the world (“all this”) is given to us and an unusual claim about how the world would appear if eternalism were right:

If one is at a moment, m1, experiencing the world as thus and just as real at an equally real moment, m2, experiencing the world as so, then one should be having—at both moments—an experience of the world as thus and as so… [W]ere temporal reality ontologically homogeneous, there would be some conflation of the experiences one has at m1 and m2… [O]ne’s experience would be some farrago of the things at both moments. (179)

If eternalism could be refuted by the farrago argument, then the only remaining question would be which particular version of presentism is correct, and how such a presentism fits into Fiocco’s theory of things. That is how Fiocco views the matter, but I doubt many eternalists will be converted by this argument.

As far as I can tell, nobody accepts the spatial or modal counterpart of the farrago argument. Suppose that one person is freezing in Antarctica and another is sweltering in the Sahara. The fact that Antarctica and the Sahara are equally real does not entail that both people would have a farrago of both experiences. At different places, people are having different experiences. Similar remarks apply to the modal case, where an actual person might be experiencing the actual world as thus and a merely possible person might be experiencing some merely possible world as so. Modal realists think that both possible worlds are equally real, but they do not think that the inhabitants of both worlds would experience a farrago of both experiences. In different possible worlds, people are having different experiences.

One might be impressed by the fact that, in the temporal case, the experiences could be had by the same person at both moments, rather than by different people at different places or by different people in different possible worlds. However, many eternalists subscribe to a metaphysics of temporal parts on which persons persist through time by possessing different temporal parts. On such a view, it would be these temporal parts that are having the various experiences. The person-at-m1 who experiences the world as thus is distinct from the person-at-m2 who experiences the world as so, just as the freezing person in Antarctica is distinct from the sweltering person in the Sahara.

The farrago argument suggests that Fiocco rejects the widely held view, sometimes attributed to Einstein, that “time is what keeps everything from happening at once”. Fiocco might well be right about this, but I am not sure that, as it stands, his very brief presentation of the farrago argument will make many converts. As with the nothing-explains-anything argument, I think we would need a more detailed defense of the farrago argument to “move past stalemate in metaphysical discussions” (22). Otherwise, the friends of ontological levels will reject the nothing-explains-anything argument, eternalists will reject the farrago argument, and we are back at the “stalemate”.

How to Read this Book

As I said before, there is much more material in this book that one could address in a short review. Those who are interested in learning everything about Fiocco’s views on ontology and time should employ the “classical” method of reading the book cover to cover. Others might want to structure their engagement with Fiocco’s work around the two pivotal arguments that I have highlighted here. Those who are interested in ontology should start with the nothing-explains-anything argument on p. 77 and then decide whether to read Chapters 2–4, which contain Fiocco’s account of ontology (minus the bits about time). The best approach to reading the discussion of time in Chapters 5–11 depends on one’s antecedent views about time. Committed eternalists should go straight to p. 179 and take a closer look at the farrago argument. Those who have already been converted to presentism might want to start with Section 10.1, where Fiocco compares his transient presentism with other variants of presentism. Either way, readers should consult Section 1.2, which gives a good overview of the entire book.

REFERENCES

Amijee, F. 2026. Whence Original Inquiry? Analysis, doi.org/10.1093/analys/anag003

Fiocco, O. 2026. Radical Ontology and the Limits of Inquiry. Analysis, doi.org/10.1093/analys/anag007

As fate would have it, these two logics were shown to diverge just before Entailment was published, as was noted immediately after the above quote, although it is unclear the extent to which tears and abandonment have resulted (although this did result in E losing its privileged position amongst all the relevant logics). Enter Edwin Mares. In The Logic of Entailment and its History, Edwin Mares shows that abandonment of E as the correct logic of entailment on the above grounds is unwarranted, by providing an independent foundation for regarding E as the correct logic of the entailment connective, which in no way depends on its connection to the relevant modal logic R☐.^[1] 

The central idea behind this new foundation for the relevant logic E is built on the idea that a logic of entailment should play two key roles in our logical theorizing. First, it should encode proof plans, which in some sense indicate the way in which a theorist can go about constructing a proof of a proposition. This notion is left somewhat underspecified, although we’ll say more about it below. Second, it should express closure conditions on theories. The idea here is that the entailment connective should act, in a sense which we’ll describe in more detail below, as a Tarskian closure operator on theories. This connection between the logic of entailment and theories is one of the distinctive, and in this reviewer’s eyes, exciting, aspects of this book. Theories play a starring role in both the semantics for the entailment connective (acting as points of evaluation), and in the proof-theoretic treatment of the entailment connective (where they are used both to interpret the indices in the Fitch-style natural deduction system for E, as well as acting as labels in the novel labelled natural deduction system Mares introduces which formalizes the notion of a proof procedure). The notion of theory here is not merely the logician’s notion of a set of sentences closed under logical consequence but rather something more akin to the treatment of models in the philosophy of science. Mares’s official account, discussed in Chapter 6, splits the difference between the received view of scientific theories and the semantic view of scientific theories by treating theories as abstract objects which, in some sense, induce both a distinguished class of (scientific) models, and (relative to a given language) a closure operation (134). This emphasis on the use of theories in giving an account of entailment is one which has gripped a number of other authors in the broadly relevant logical tradition in recent years. What Mares’s account does, though, is make very explicit the underlying disagreements in this area in a unified vocabulary. We’ll return to this aspect of the book further below.

After an introductory chapter, the book is split up into three parts. Part I ‘Entailment in the Twentieth Century’ provides a history of the development of logics of entailment, covering the work of C.I. Lewis and his students (Chapter 2), possible worlds theories of entailment (Chapter 3), and the Anderson and Belnap school of relevance logic (Chapter 4), ending with a chapter on the notion of ‘reflexivizing’ a logic by the addition of a modal operator representing logical necessity (Chapter 5). This opinionated survey of the history of entailment acts as valuable context for the story that is presented in the rest of the book and should provide the reader not immersed in the relevant logical tradition sufficient background to understand the broader context for moves being made in what follows.

Part II ‘Theories and Entailment’ then introduces the central notions of a theory—understood, as mentioned above, as a scientific theory—and Tarski’s notion of a closure operator on formal theories (Chapter 6) and then introduces two relevant logics, Tarski Logic and Generalized Tarski logic, which isolate many of the key features of the semantics of entailment to come (Chapter 7).

Finally in Part III, ‘The Logic E of Relevant Entailment’, Mares presents his full story regarding the relevant entailment logic E, arguing that the entailment connective should satisfy more principles than those of Generalized Tarski logic through the introduction of a novel natural deduction system for reasoning about theories (Chapter 9), and then introducing negation and disjunction (Chapter 9), both of which are treated using the notion of (in)compatibility between theories, and finally the quantifiers (Chapter 10), which are treated using the semantics given in terms of propositional functions, which Mares developed in conjunction with Rob Goldblatt (2006), as well as delicate issues concerning the proper treatment of identity in relevant logics in general, and the logic of entailment in particular. The final chapter (Chapter 11) closes by looking at some remaining philosophical issues concerning how to use relevant logics to study theories that are closed under other logics, in particular classical logic, and how to model the way theorists often use one theory as a background theory to reason about other theories.

As you can see, the book covers quite a lot of ground, and what I want to convey in the remainder of this review is to survey the development of semantics for the logic of entailment that Mares presents, situating it within a broader trend in thinking about issues in philosophical logic in terms of theories, and then briefly return to the issue of ‘reflexive’ accounts of entailment, like that of R☐, and what Mares account says (or more conspicuously doesn’t say) about them.

Semantics for the Logic of Entailment

Understanding and interpreting the semantics for relevant logics is a fraught and often unsatisfying business. One of the distinctive features of Mares's approach to the semantics of entailment is how it is built up in stages, the first stage centering the connection to consequence operations, the second features of theories and theory induced consequence operations, and the third and final stage features of proof plans. Each of these stages is tied to a different (relevant) logic of entailment.

The first of these logics is TL or ‘Tarski Logic’ and is closely tied to Tarski’s notion of a consequence operation. A consequence operation C is an operation which satisfies the following conditions, where X and Y are sets of sentences: (1) X⊆ C(X), (2) if X⊆ Y then C(X) ⊆ C(Y), and (3) C(C(X)) ⊆ C(X). This is the usual, language agnostic, account of a consequence operation. To deal with conjunction, Mares adds to these the condition that A∧B∈ C(X) iff A∈ C(X) and B∈ C(X). We can then specify the valid entailments of TL as precisely those entailments where (A1∧…∧An)→ B iff B∈C(X), where each of the Ai∈ X (p.126).

Mares then shows that this logic can be conservatively extended by the addition of disjunction and a de Morgan negation, yielding Priest’s basic relevant logic N4 (132-134). N4 is a relatively underexplored logic, but it has a very tight connection to the logic FDE, with the only entailment formulas provable in this logic being precisely those entailments that are valid in the FDE, if we allow conditionals to appear in first-degree entailments, but give them no special inferential properties (treating them essentially like propositional variables). In several works beginning with (2017), Jc Beall has argued that FDE is the correct logic of theory closure, and so the correct logic of entailment, and this connection between N4 and theory closure only makes this case stronger.

One notable weakness of TL as a logic of entailment is that it validates no iterated entailment claims that aren’t instances of identity. But intuitively, there are many proof plans that do involve transforming entailment claims into other entailment claims. To rectify this, Mares introduces the second logic on our path to what he regards as the true logic of entailment. The intensional semantics that Mares offers for this logic, Generalized Tarski Logic or GTL, has theories as its indices of evaluation. Models for this language consist of a set of theories T, a distinguished theory Ó—the theory of entailment—along with an ordering relation ≤, and a binary operation o on theories.^[2] 

The guiding idea here is that we should understand an entailment claim A→ B as being satisfied by a theory a iff for all theories b which satisfy A the theory that results from applying a’s closure relation Ca to b satisfies B.^[3] The binary operation o of the semantics is to be interpreted in terms of the consequence operations that are induced by different theories, with a o b picking out the theory Ca(b) that results from applying a’s closure operation to the theory b. These theory-relative closure operations are argued to satisfy analogues of conditions (2) and (3) above, but not, crucially, condition (1).

Why? Because if all theory closure relations satisfied the analogue of condition (1), then all theories would have to contain all the true entailments, making all theories theories of entailment. What we do have, though, is that condition (1) is satisfied for our distinguished theory. The resulting logic GTL is essentially the implication-conjunction fragment of the relevant logic DJ, and the techniques used in the following chapters to treat the other sentential connectives could be used to transform GTL into DJ proper in a similar way to how we were able to lift TL to the logic N4. Shay Allen Logan has given a similar interpretation of the operational semantics for relevant logics to that given by Mares for GTL (2024), except that he rejects condition (3), yielding the minimal relevant logic B as the correct logic of entailment.

Why not think, then, that a logic like DJ or B is the correct logic of entailment? Because, Mares argues, such logics give us no direction on how to stage proofs. Mares provides the following abstract example: suppose A→ (B→ C) is an entailment and that we are considering a theory T which satisfies A and want to show that T satisfies C. Mares argues that what we ought to do is try to show that T satisfies B. But for this to be an appropriate proof plan, we would need it to be the case that Ca(a) = a—a weak form of contraction. It is through considerations of proof plans that Mares argues that our logic of entailment should be the relevant logic E.

The arguments that Mares gives for accepting principles are presented in terms of a Prawitz-style, labelled natural deduction system whose rules manipulate judgements that a particular formula is part of a given theory. This makes very visible the ways in which the different structural principles concerning the theory relative consequence operations are being appealed to and what different proof plans require—in the above case, for example, we can see that this weak form of contraction requires that all theories be closed under modus ponens—if they contain a conditional and its antecedent, then they contain its consequent. Mares refers to this as a calculus for reasoning about proof processes, which demonstrate how a proof plan can be implemented (151).

It is here in Chapter 7 that I think we get the clearest picture of how we are meant to understand proof plans through the way they are meant to be used. Proof plans are ‘used to make inferences about the contents of theories’ (151) by providing an inventory of the methods of proof that are available in all theories.^[4] The use of this calculus of proof processes makes Mares’s justification of the additions to GTL which result in the logic E clear and focused in a way which I suspect will assist in moving the debate regarding what the correct logic of entailment is forward.

Considerations of theories and proof plans settle the logical behavior of the conditional and conjunction. What, then, of the other sentential connectives? Mares account of the semantics for negation and disjunction is given rather elegantly in terms of the notion of incompatibility between theories. On this account, a negation is satisfied by a theory a just in case any theory which satisfies the sentence negated is incompatible with a. The notion of incompatibility is then used to give the satisfaction conditions for disjunction, in order to maintain the De Morgan duality between it and conjunction. This is done by identifying the class of saturated extensions of a theory a—roughly those theories that extend a and are compatible with a unique maximal theory—and then having a disjunction be satisfied by a theory a iff every saturated extension of a satisfies one of the disjuncts. This is an elegant advance of the usual treatment of these issues in Fine’s operational semantics.

Reflexivization and the logic NR

One feature of the book which I was disappointed was not discussed in more detail was the connection between E and R☐(which Mares refers to as NR) mentioned above. In Chapter 5, Mares does discuss how we could construct a logic of entailment by adding a logical necessity operator to R and then internalize facts about natural deduction proofs in R in terms of the strict implication connective defined in terms of it.

On the topic of why we shouldn’t think of this as giving us the correct logic of entailment, assuming that R is the correct logic of contingent relevant implication, we are told that the tasks that Mares has in mind for a logic of entailment “do not seem to require an underlying theory of contingent implication” (111) and that the resulting logic we get from such an account is not E.

What seemed to be missing here is some discussion of what to make of this situation, especially considering Mares’s endorsement of NR as the correct logic of entailment in his earlier book, Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Interpretation (2004) . For example, early in the book on p.8 we are told that “there are…At least two distinct notions of entailment: one that treats theory closure and proof plans and another that deals with metaphysical closures of various kinds”. Why not think that something like NR is capturing that second notion of entailment, the notion of entailment which seems to be more closely tied to Moore’s original discussion of internal relations? A discussion of this issue would have the additional virtue of allowing for a deeper discussion of how the view here interacts and sits with the view of entailment in Relevant Logic.

Conclusion

Relevant logic is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, but largely with a focus on weaker relevant logics. Mares’s book (especially in conjunction with his earlier book on R) stakes out a claim for the continued interest and importance of ‘stronger’ relevant logics like E. The book provides a fresh and stimulating argument for regarding E as the correct logic of entailment, situating it in both the history of relevant logic, as well as recent trends in philosophical logic towards situating logic more broadly within our overall theorizing. I’ve only managed to scratch the surface of the wealth of philosophical and logical insights the book contains. Anyone interested in the concept of entailment, or wanting an entryway into the contemporary renaissance in relevant logic should read this book.

REFERENCES

[1] Alan Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity, Vol. I. Princeton University Press, 1975.

[2] Jc Beall. There is no logical negation: True, false, both, and neither. Australasian Journal of Logic, 14:1-29, 2017.

[3] Kit Fine. Models for entailment. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 3:347–372, 1974.

[4] Shay Allen Logan. Relevance Logic (Elements in Philosophy and Logic). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

[5] Edwin D. Mares. Relevant logic: A Philosophical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[6] Edwin Mares and Robert Goldblatt. An alternative semantics for quantified relevant logic. The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 71:163–187, 2006

Stenberg works towards this account by first developing an account of individual happiness (Part I) and then arguing (Part II) that not only is common happiness the ultimate end of human beings themselves, but the requirements of “law, virtue and grace” are all ordered to that common happiness. While I agree that “common happiness” is essential to Aquinas’s eudaimonism, and while I agree that some of Stenberg’s claims will provoke controversy, I do not consider his central thesis to constitute the significant break with existing scholarship on Aquinas that he does.

In Part I, Stenberg offers an account of Aquinas’s view of individual happiness. While Thomists commonly understand Aquinas to be a “perfectionist” about happiness, Stenberg argues (Ch.1) that Aquinas is a specific kind of perfectionist about happiness (i.e., that he understands happiness to consist in a perfection of human nature), namely, a “Restrictive Perfectionist”. Restrictive Perfectionists, unlike “Inclusive Perfectionists” (who understand all perfective goods to be constitutive parts of an individual’s happiness) and “Personal Perfectionists” (who understand all perfections of a person to be constitutive parts of that person’s happiness), consider “only a subset of an agent’s perfections” or perfective goods to constitute an individual’s happiness (24, 28, 32).

By focusing on the question of what “constitutes” happiness, Stenberg intends to zero in on what is actually part of happiness, as opposed to what is merely necessary for, presupposed by, or helpful for happiness. Key limes, eggs and sugar are constitutive of key lime pie; an oven is necessary for making the pie, a professional’s advice is helpful. Stenberg is interested in what constitutes happiness, not in what is necessary or helpful for happiness. He argues (Chs. 2-5) that while Aquinas recognizes various forms of happiness, every form of happiness is “exclusively” constituted by the same thing: by “enjoying genuinely good activities”. Both “exclusivity” and “enjoyment” have important roles to play in Stenberg’s account.

The claim that happiness is exclusively constituted by enjoying good activities is intended to highlight the difference between things that help, fill out, or are preconditions of happiness and those things that are, in fact, constitutive of happiness. So, for instance, in his discussions of Aquinas’s account of the various kinds of happiness, Stenberg is concerned to distinguish between things that are preconditions of, necessary for, or even increase existing happiness and those things that are actually ingredients of happiness (79-95, 116-119, 132-141).

But he also seeks to draw attention to an important respect in which (according to Stenberg) Aquinas’s understanding of happiness differs from Aristotle’s. Aristotle claims that happiness consists of the activity of virtue “in a complete life”. As Stenberg interprets this claim, this means that for Aristotle a complete life is an ingredient, i.e., a constitutive part, of happiness. Aristotle, as Stenberg reads him, would not consider individuals with abbreviated lifespans or even those who (whether long-lived or not) meet with calamitous ends, to be happy. Stenberg argues that Aquinas, rejecting Aristotle’s “complete life” requirement for happiness, instead considers happiness to be “episodic”, which is to say, “something that primarily characterizes episodes in a life or parts of a life” (40; see also 104, 119). Stenberg offers the most extensive arguments for the “episodic” nature of happiness in Chapter 2, in the context of his discussion of imperfect happiness, which raises important questions about whether and in what respect perfect happiness would be “episodic”. I will return to this question at greater length in what follows.

In claiming that for Aquinas, happiness consists exclusively in the enjoyment of genuinely good activities, Stenberg is proposing that “enjoyment”, where “enjoyment is understood in a certain highly specific way”, is just what happiness is. The full import of this thesis becomes clear in Stenberg’s consideration of perfect happiness in Chapter 3, especially in his interpretation of Aquinas’s claim that “fruitio” (usually translated as enjoyment) is “the very essence of happiness” (66). Since Aquinas also repeatedly claims that the essence of perfect happiness is the vision of God and describes fruitio (enjoyment) as “like” a per se accident that follows on the vision, Stenberg proposes that Aquinas must understand the fruitio that is the “very essence” of happiness to be a “complex activity with two constitutive elements: the vision of God in God’s essence and the enjoyment of that vision” (73).

This requires holding that Aquinas, in spite of comparing the enjoyment that follows on the vision of God to a per se accident, does not actually consider it to be such (since a per se accident is not part of the essence). Stenberg argues that this view is preferable because it makes Aquinas’s view more similar to that of his contemporaries and is also—in his view—a plausible reading of Aquinas’s text. Stenberg seems to believe that “enjoyment”, understood in this way, is operative in all the varieties of happiness, but it seems to have the most dramatic implications for perfect happiness.

Finally, Stenberg argues that the “true ultimate end” of each human being, at any level, is the common happiness. “Common happiness”, as Stenberg understands it, is

constituted by all (or very many) of a community’s members engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities that are consistent with, partially constitutive of, and motivated at some level by the individual happinesses of a community’s members. (166)

Perfect happiness, the happiness of heaven, “is an individual’s participation in the shared activity of heaven” (171), and the analog of this is evident in the forms of happiness available on earth (176). The remaining chapters on law (Ch.7) and virtue (Ch.8) argue that the requirements of law and virtue, too, are ordered to the common happiness.

At the risk of stating the obvious, different types of philosophers approach Aquinas in different ways and typically have as their primary interlocuters other scholars who share their philosophical approach. Stenberg approaches Aquinas from the standpoint of an analytic philosopher, and one of his primary goals seems to be to make Aquinas appealing to other analytic philosophers. As someone who agrees with Stenberg that more people should love Aquinas, I think this is a good thing. At the same time, however, precisely because those operating from different philosophical “schools” approach Aquinas in different ways and talk mainly to each other, it can happen that a reading that seems quite revolutionary from one standpoint seems quite common from another.

Stenberg has, to his credit, made a very thorough canvas of existing scholarship on Aquinas. That thorough research notwithstanding, the question that loomed largest in my mind throughout my reading of Stenberg’s book was whether specialists in Thomist moral philosophy, especially those whose approach to Aquinas is more historical than analytic, would agree with his claim that Aquinas’s interpreters “almost universally” disagree with the idea that common, rather than individual, happiness is the central aim of human life (40, 171). The most recent version of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Aquinas’s moral, political, and legal philosophy, for instance, says that the desire for beatitude that guides practical reason is “not to be thought of as the happiness of the deliberating and acting individual alone, but rather as the common flourishing of the community, ultimately the whole community of humankind” (Finnis, 1.2). In his excellent paper on self-love in Aquinas, similarly, David Gallagher claims that for Aquinas, the rightly ordered human being thinks only of the common good (1999, 43). Neither of these readings presents itself as breaking with traditional understandings of Aquinas.

Stenberg is clearly not unaware of either of these pieces of scholarship: Gallagher’s piece is in his bibliography, even if it is not directly engaged, and an earlier version of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry is cited among those who Stenberg believes “almost universally disagree” with his central claim. But since their claims sound—at least to my mind—so similar to the one Stenberg wishes to advance, I would have hoped for some detailed account of what he understands the difference between his account and theirs to be.

Stenberg’s project is a sweeping one, and very much more could be said than I have the space to address here. I would like to round out this review by addressing two central claims that I do think many readers will find surprising and perhaps controversial. The first has to do with Stenberg’s claim that Aquinas, in depicting happiness as “exclusively” about “enjoying genuinely good activities” and understanding happiness as “episodic”, makes a significant departure from Aristotle. Aristotle certainly does say that happiness is the activity of virtue “in a complete life”, but there is significant scholarly disagreement over what he means by that. The most reasonable interpretation, in my view, takes seriously the sense intended by the person Aristotle quotes (Solon), namely, that the happiness of a human life needs to be judged retrospectively: happiness is an assessment made of a life as whole (1995, 253).

Viewed as a whole, a very abbreviated life, like that of hero who dies young but who gives his life to save an entire city or nation, might exhibit much more happiness than that of someone of more ordinary virtue, who dies at a ripe old age, asleep in his bed. And the happiness of a life has to be assessed retrospectively, at least some scholars have argued, because virtue can be lost and because certain ways of acting (especially in our reactions to misfortune) show the happiness we thought another or ourselves to have possessed was never really there in the first place.

If this is Aristotle’s view, then “completeness” is not one ingredient among others but a vantage point from which something is assessed, and therefore not at all akin to an ingredient, essential or otherwise, of a pie. I can’t know if the recipe for my pie succeeded until the pie comes out of the oven, and I eat it. If this is Aristotle’s view, then it sounds very like the view that happiness is more continuous the more genuine it is, a view that squares well not just with Aquinas but with Aquinas’s view of heavenly happiness. Even the best earthly happiness is imperfect because it is interrupted and interruptible; it is the more perfect the less interruptible it is, and heavenly happiness, which is not interrupted, is best of all.

Finally, although less central to the case he wishes to make, Stenberg’s notion of “enjoyment”—i.e., of happiness as composed of both activity and enjoyment, each as essential constituent parts—merits a word. If one is to argue that what Aquinas says is “like” a per se accident is, in fact, not a per se accident, then it seems to me that one would be best served by making that argument on the basis of the very nature of a per se accident itself. If the enjoyment that follows on the vision of God is not a per se accident of that vision, then it should be possible to point to some feature that per se accidents have that enjoyment does not. Such an analysis would seemingly be more convincing than any considerations of Aquinas’s contemporaries or even possible ways of reconciling texts.

With all this said, the author of this book evinces a clear love for Aquinas and a desire not just to present Aquinas’s comprehensive vision but to persuade others of its value.

REFERENCES

John Finnis, “Aquinas’s Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2021).

David M. Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others”, ACTA Philosophica 8, no. 1 (1999).

Paul Farwell, “Aristotle and the Complete Life,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1995).

Throughout the book, Wüthrich and Huggett argue that it is possible to have a world without spacetime at its most fundamental level of description, but in which spacetime “emerges” as some approximate or effective description. For this, they appeal to spacetime functionalism, which would be analogous to the common functional reductions and explanations that appear in other areas of physics or science. For instance, to explain how a gas made of molecules can appear to behave as a continuum fluid, one can analyze the roles that macroscopic quantities like pressure or temperature play and try to see if the microscopic entities could fulfill them, even if in an approximate manner. Although there is no fluid exerting a constant and uniform pressure over the walls of a container, this effect can be explained by the collisions of the molecules, which, on average, are quite uniform and constant. The idea then is to apply the same strategy to spacetime: even if a theory of quantum gravity predicts that there is no spacetime, if the functions and roles we usually ascribe to it can be functionally recovered, then a theory without spacetime at the fundamental level could be compatible with our world.

Spacetime functionalism differs from standard functionalism in that it cannot make use of spacetime concepts to identify functions and is therefore not as straightforwardly applicable. While in the case of the gas, it is straightforward to identify the fluid with the molecules as they occupy the same space and their dynamics develop in similar ways, understanding how non-spatiotemporal entities behave and how they can play spatiotemporal roles poses a formidable challenge. Wüthrich and Huggett acknowledge this, and in Chapter 2, they develop in detail their account of spacetime functionalism. For a functional reduction of spacetime to be satisfactory, they establish two requirements. First, one needs to mathematically derive, probably in some approximate manner, spatiotemporal structures from non-spatiotemporal ones. Second, this derivation needs to be “physically salient”.

The first requirement is largely uncontroversial, while the second one is harder to pin down. Wüthrich and Huggett share the intuition many of us have that not every mathematical derivation makes a satisfactory functional explanation and so they demand something more. Their explanation of this additional requirement is somewhat disappointing: for them, it is something context-dependent and changing. They illustrate this with the case of local, mechanistic explanations. Throughout the history of physics, the status of explanations with non-local features has been changing: they seemed too controversial in early modern physics, then they became accepted with Newton’s law of gravity, then they were replaced by propagating field explanations, and the story continues. They take this case to show that the concept of “physical salience” shifts with paradigm change, and that it is ultimately empirical success that determines what is considered physically salient. Given this analysis, their conclusion is somewhat surprising. One might think that, as “physical salience” seems to be contextual, it is ill-defined, and that it shouldn’t be a requirement. Instead, they keep it as a necessary condition for functional explanations of spacetime to be satisfactory. In any case, the philosophical discussion of spacetime functionalism is very complete, and it is interesting from the broad philosophy of science and metaphysics perspectives.

The remainder of the book analyzes three approaches to quantum gravity and argues that spacetime is missing at the fundamental level of each, that spacetime can be derived functionally in all of them, and that these derivations are physically salient. These approaches are causal set theory, loop quantum gravity (LQG), and string theory. The presentations by Wüthrich and Huggett of all these approaches are thorough, and they not only serve to advance the book’s philosophical arguments, but they are excellent introductions to these three approaches that cover the motivations, intuitions, and a technical overview, as well as discussions of other interesting philosophical issues arising in them, such as background independence and the role of background structures, A-theories and B-theories of time in the context of causal set growth, or the interpretation of dual models. The book is therefore a delightful compendium that works as a perfect introduction to quantum gravity and the philosophical issues arising in it.

Even if some aspects of quantum gravity are technically challenging, especially those surrounding string theory, Wüthrich and Huggett make a considerable effort to make quantum gravity accessible, and most of the book can be read without advanced knowledge. Some passages are a bit more technical and will satisfy the more mathematically oriented reader, but they can be skipped, as Wüthrich and Huggett continuously guide the reader and insist on their main philosophical claims. The book is also an excellent guide to the bibliography, as the authors constantly direct the reader to the relevant literature, including the most basic and introductory, but also the more technical and advanced works.

Do Wüthrich and Huggett achieve their main philosophical goal? In my opinion, they successfully show that some spatiotemporal features are missing in some of the structures in the approaches they discuss, but they ultimately fall short of demonstrating a complete case of spacetime emergence. In some cases, this is because the allegedly non-spatiotemporal entities remain quite spatiotemporal, and in others, because the way in which the spatiotemporal roles are supposed to be recovered is unclear or questionable. Regarding physical salience, they claim the putative cases of emergence they discuss have physical salience, although to me, the concept remains quite elusive.

The first of the three approaches analyzed is causal set theory. This approach takes causal relations to be the fundamental constituents of spacetime and proposes replacing continuum spacetimes with causal sets, which are discrete collections of elements—similar to atoms of spacetime—endowed with causal relations. As Wüthrich and Huggett explain, from a macroscopic perspective, causal sets are indistinguishable from continuum spacetime, just as a collection of molecules appears to be a continuum fluid. In this sense, they argue that causal sets are able to fulfill the roles of spacetime, and the claim of emergence is granted. They further argue that causal sets are very different from a continuum spacetime, as they can be organized in ways that do not resemble spacetime. Nevertheless, as a case of spacetime emergence, it is not spectacular: if one considers that the causal relation is the fundamental ingredient of spacetime, rather than having spacetime emerge from something non-spatiotemporal, it instead emerges from a discrete version of itself. There is a point of semantic discussion here, but regardless of whether one considers causal sets as spatiotemporal or not, the emergence they demonstrate is not of the most radical or controversial kind possible.

The case of loop quantum gravity has the potential to be an example of the most interesting case of emergence. Wüthrich and Huggett give a detailed outline of how, by applying the canonical quantization procedure to general relativity, one can arrive at this theory, and they also explain the way in which LQG has shifted recently to a covariant formalism that avoids some of the original problems. In this way, they give a complete and up-to-date introduction to the theory. The claim of disappearance of spacetime is supported by two features of the theory. First, the states of the theory, spin networks, are discrete structures that are similar to discrete spaces, although in some cases they can present features like disordered locality that make them not straightforwardly discrete spaces. Wüthrich and Huggett dedicate most of their effort to arguing that this is a case of spacetime emergence. However, as in the causal set case, that a discrete structure can approximate a continuum one is not that surprising, and the most philosophically interesting claim of emergence has to do with the dynamics of the theory.

Loop quantum gravity, like other canonical approaches, suffers from a problem of time and change: the Schrödinger equation that tells states how to evolve in time becomes trivial, and states do not evolve, as Wüthrich and Huggett explain in more detail. For this reason, the theory is described to be timeless and changeless, and it could provide a more interesting case of spacetime emergence. The authors mention two ways in which this problem of time and change is claimed to be solved in the literature in order to have time and dynamics emerging from this timeless formalism. These are relationalism and the use of the covariant formalism that embeds states in a spatiotemporal setting. However, despite this type of emergence being the most interesting (at least from my point of view), the authors dedicate little space to discussing these two strategies for solving the problem of time and do not consider in detail the arguments that can be raised against them. It is for this reason that I think that the chapters on loop quantum gravity, despite being an excellent introduction to the theory for philosophers and a great reference on the topic, fall short of showing a complete case of spacetime emergence.

Finally, the chapters on string theory do a wonderful job in introducing this approach to philosophers. Despite the more technical passages, the authors make these chapters very readable, clearly explaining the philosophical issues arising in this approach and the positions they take. Regarding emergence, their main argument is concerned with dualities, in particular, T-duality. In some models of string theory, one has two formal spaces: target space and winding space, describing how strings move and how they are wrapped around a compact dimension. While it is at first tempting to interpret target space as the space we seem to inhabit, dualities make the case not so straightforward, as for any model in which the interesting dynamics happen in target space, there is a dual model in which the roles are swapped, and winding space seems to be the space corresponding to physical space. Wüthrich and Huggett’s position is that dualities mean that neither of these two formal spaces is space, and that one should think of space as emergent. This is a well-argued case of emergence, and different in kind from the discrete-continuum emergence. But notice that it is, at least as presented, a case of emergence of space and not of spacetime. Regarding time and dynamics, string theory keeps the structure of quantum field theory, and in the discussion in this book, we do not find indications that time would disappear.

Despite not being convinced by its main philosophical point, I can only recommend the reader to dive into Out of Nowhere and enjoy a complete and up-to-date presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum gravity. There is much to learn from this book, which I am certain will become an indispensable reference in the area and one that will attract attention and generate enriching philosophical debate.

Mehta rejects monism, the assumption that the same kind of sensory awareness is deployed towards both objects and their properties. He argues that perception consists of two distinct kinds of sensory awareness woven together. First, an infallible nonrepresentational kind of awareness of sensory qualities (conceived of as universals) that partly reveals their essence; he calls this deep awareness. Second, a fallible representational kind of awareness of particulars that does not purport to reveal any essences. The view is pluralist because it posits more than one form of sensory awareness. It is rich because of its ancillary commitments regarding hallucination, sensory imagination, and episodic memory. Hence the name rich pluralism.

Mehta’s book is divided into four unequal sections. In the first section, in Chapter 1, he sketches his view and the dialectical terrain. In Chap. 2-4, he builds up and explains rich pluralism. The second section consists of a single chapter (Chap. 5) comparing rich pluralism to representationalism. Against the representationalist, Mehta argues that rich pluralism can help itself to all the machinery of the representationalist and so gain all its explanatory power. However, rich pluralism is superior because it correctly predicts that we cannot err about the essence of sensory qualities. In the third section (Chap. 6-9), Mehta compares rich pluralism to naïve realism. Against the naïve realist, he argues that naïve realism has no explanatory advantages over rich pluralism. Rich pluralism is superior because it extends elegantly to conscious hallucinations, episodic memories, and sensory imaginings. Naïve realists would need to introduce complications to account for those phenomena. In the final section (Chap. 10-12), Mehta helpfully disambiguates “phenomenal character”, responds to the Argument from Hallucination, and sums up his view. Concision forces elision so I shall focus on presenting rich pluralism from the ground up and then raise some worries.

Mehta’s framing assumption in Chap. 1 is that “When you (consciously) see the mango, you are sensorily aware of it and its color and shape. In addition, whether you (consciously) see or hallucinate a mango, you are not sensorily aware of any peculiar mental entities” (2). This assumption carries an incredible load because Mehta rather quickly takes it to rule out adverbialism, dual-component theories, and sense-data views (2-3). He also takes it to build in the directness of perception: when a perceiver sees a mango, the perceiver does not see it in virtue of perceiving something else (3). Mehta is left with two opponents: representationalists and naïve realists.

In the rest of the first section, Mehta isolates the distinctive features of the two, contrasting kinds of sensory awareness that form the core of rich pluralism: deep awareness and successful sensory representation. To build up to their core features, we need to understand some of Mehta’s machinery: revelation, partial revelation, universals, and essences.

Mehta tells us that

[f]or a mental state or event M to reveal a truth p about some entity e is for the following conditions to be met:

(i) M makes the subject aware of entity e.

(ii) For a conceptually sophisticated subject, rational reflection on M will, by itself, make it seem that p is true.

(iii) The subject’s awareness of entity e, as described in (i), provides an intelligible basis for its seeming that p is true, as described in (ii). (18)

Mehta is charitably read as restricting the ‘revealed’ propositions p to those about the nature of e, rather than mundane truth such as “e appears to the left of the ball”. Mehta clarifies that, strictly speaking, it is not, say, redness that is revealed but true propositions about redness (ibid). These propositions need not seem immediately or obviously true and may require “complex feats of reasoning, imagination, and memory” (19). Mehta adds a demanding fourth condition in response to an objection: “Recall that for a perception to seem to reveal a claim, it is not enough for the claim to seem to be true to some subject just on the basis of reflecting on that perception. The subject must be fully rational” (39).

How much does revelation reveal? Mehta takes the middle path between the claim that it reveals nothing (21-24) and the claim that it reveals the entire essence of its targets (25-41). He rejects both in favour of:

Partial revelation: Consciously perceiving any sensory quality Q reveals a substantial portion of the essential truths about Q, that is, truths of the form <It lies in the essence of Q that…>. (49)

Examples of the truths Mehta has in mind include “It lies in the essences of scarlet and lime green that nothing can at once be wholly scarlet and wholly lime green”, “It lies in the essences of scarlet, mango orange, and lime green that scarlet is more similar to mango orange than it is to lime green”, and “It lies in the essence of scarlet that any instance of scarlet is spatially extended” (19-20). Revelation is partial because it does not reveal whether, for example, colours are elemental or compound (36). Mehta extends partial revelation to cover cases of sensory qualities not just in perception but also hallucinations, sensations, sensory imaginings, and both genuine and apparent episodic memories: hence extended partial revelation (§3.1).

Why think that extended partial revelation is true? Mehta argues it is because perceivers are sensorily aware of universals (§3.6), in virtue of which the truths revealed involve essences. Why essences? The experience of an instance of scarlet reveals not only that this instance is spatially extended, but that all instances of scarlet must be. What explained that? Mehta thinks the answer must be that spatial extension is part of what it is to be an instance of scarlet—which is just to say that it is part of the essence of scarlet; hence essences (16-18).

With these materials in hand, the first kind of sensory awareness is deep awareness:

DA1. Deep awareness occurs in all sensory experiences, including all conscious perceptions, hallucinations, sensations, sensory imaginings, genuine episodic memories, and merely apparent episodic memories.

DA2. At least in the sensory experiences of beings like us, the only targets of deep awareness are certain universals— the sensory qualities.

DA3. Deep awareness is a nonrepresentational form of awareness that reveals a substantial portion— not necessarily all!—of the essences of its targets. (59)

DA1 delineates the scope of deep awareness, D2 its targets, and D3 its structure and epistemic significance. Because its targets are either instantiated or uninstantiated universals (as in hallucination), it is partly essence-revealing across all the types of conscious awareness, including hallucination (as mentioned in DA 1). Because it is nonrepresentational it cannot mistake the essence of a sensory quality (§2.9, §5.10). Deep awareness is constitutively linked to conscious awareness. Deep awareness identifies those consciousness states and events that characteristically generate the hard problem of consciousness (§4.6-4.7).

In contrast to deep awareness, the second form of sensory awareness is successful sensory representation:

SSR1. Successful sensory representation occurs in all perceptions and in all (genuine) episodic memories, whether conscious or unconscious. It does not occur in any hallucinations, sensory imaginings, or failed episodic “memories”— here we find only failed sensory representations.

SSR2. The targets of successful sensory representation include particulars, such as ordinary objects and their property-instances. (Rich pluralism is neutral on whether these targets sometimes include universals, too.)

SSR3. Successful sensory representation is a representational form of awareness that never even seems to reveal any portion of the essences of its targets (58-59).

Analogous to DA 1-3, SSR1-3 delineate the scope, targets, and structure and epistemic significance of successful sensory representation. Unlike deep awareness, it is not constitutively linked to conscious awareness, nor does it even purport to reveal the essence of ordinary objects and their property-instances. Because it is a kind of representational awareness, it can err. Hallucinations are thus failed sensory representation.

How are deep awareness and successful sensory representation woven together? In veridical perception of an ovoid orange mango, the perceiver is deeply aware of the universals ovoidness and orangeness and successfully sensorily represents the mango and its property-instances. Crucially, sensorily representing those property-instances as universals binds the two kinds of awareness into a unified mental event (7).

The final component of rich pluralism is an account of categorisation or the automatic and subpersonal application of concepts. Both experiences and their targets are categorised. For example, experiences are categorised as perceptions, sensations, or sensory imagining. Their targets are categorised as, for example, mind-independent or not. Categorisation is the product of an overall gestalt based on cues like vivacity, stability, continuity, involuntariness, and cues pertaining to how the target interacts with the environment or the subject’s body (§8.3-8.11).

With deep awareness, successful sensory representation, and categorisation in hand, the rich pluralist distinguishes veridical perception from matching hallucination as follows. In both cases, the perceiver is deeply aware of the universals of ovoidness and orangeness. The universals are instantiated in perception and uninstantiated in hallucination. Perception involves successful sensory representation with genuine singular content. The matching hallucination involves failed sensory representation with only purportedly singular content. In both cases the overall gestalt is perceptual, correctly so in perception and mistakenly so in hallucination.

Let me turn to two worries. First, Mehta states that his theorizing starts not from common sense or theory but from data—the verdicts of armchair introspection. He appeals to them at important junctures (2, 3, 136, 196, 201, 285). Although he acknowledges introspection may be unreliable, he thinks the verdicts he appeals to are “very hard to dispute” (2fn1). I am less sanguine. For example, he rules out adverbialism because it is plausible that perception has an act-object structure, “just on the basis of introspection” (2). This has been vigorously disputed. Russell, for instance, thought experience has an act-object structure but denied it was introspectable (1913: 121). C.D. Broad thought that introspection reveals a spectrum of cases: some with a clear act-object structure such as seeing the mango; some with an in-between character such as smell (I surmise); and some without any clear act-object structure, such as a headache. It is not obvious that headaches involve an act towards a “headachy” object (1927: 254-257). The methodological upshot is that philosophers often cannot adjudicate the verdicts of introspection without appealing to theoretical considerations. The point is pressing because Mehta himself acknowledges that introspection can mislead (202, 285). Introspective verdicts require more defense than Mehta provides to carry the burdens he places on them.

My second worry concerns Mehta’s use of parsimony. A monist admits only one kind of sensory awareness; Mehta admits two. Mehta’s strategy is to force monists to posit another kind of sensory awareness. Their views then prove just as unparsimonious as his on the number of kinds of sensory awareness (xii, 9, 119, 131, §5.9, 142, 232, 236, 290, 292, 294). Mehta provides no clear criterion for individuating kinds of sensory awareness, so adjudicating these disputes is tricky. Even if—a big if—we grant Mehta’s arguments on the narrow point of the number of kinds of sensory awareness, I worry that weighing parsimony so narrowly resembles weighing three-course meals by their first course alone. Mehta’s view commits him not only to two kinds of sensory awareness, but also universals, essences, infallibility, and fully rational subjects. Arguably, global considerations of parsimony speak against him.

Mehta’s book suits an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level class on the philosophy of perception. The book is easy to navigate, as Mehta indents key definitions, arguments, and theories from the main text, systematically enumerates and responds to several objections, and provides a helpful glossary. It is packed with provocative arguments and ideas. Mehta’s pellucid and fleet-footed prose is such a joy that this reader would have welcomed a hundred pages more on those matters over which he passes over too quickly.

REFERENCES

Bengson, J.; Grube, E. & Korman, D. Z. 2011. A New Framework for Conceptualism.
Noûs (45: 167-189)

Broad, C.D. 1927. Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Byrne, A. & Logue, H. 2008. Either/Or in Haddock, A. & Macpherson, F. (eds.) Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 57-94

Russell, B. 1913. Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript. London: Routledge

In the vein of recent work on epistêmê as understanding (for example, Moravcsik 1979, Burnyeat 1980 and 1981, Annas 1981, Schwab 2016 and 2020, Moss 2020), Jagannathan’s thesis is that Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom (phronêsis) should be interpreted as practical understanding. Jagannathan’s main strategy in the book is to argue from contrasts. By showing how practical wisdom is unlike a range of other epistemic states related to the human good (such as an intuitive sense of what to do; ethical experience (empeiria); theoretical wisdom (sophia); science (epistêmê); and so on), he concludes that “what is left is for practical wisdom to be a distinctly practical form of understanding” (121). Very roughly, phronêsis is a form of understanding in that it is a virtue—a developed intellectual perfection—by which we consistently hit on the truth in a certain domain; by which we grasp universal causes and principles explaining why things are so in that domain; and by which we have a thorough, comprehensive grasp of that domain. And it is a practical form of understanding in that it is used for deliberating about and choosing virtuous action.

The book stands out in several respects. Jagannathan helpfully brings Aristotle into uncommon conversations: for example, with Isocrates, Protagoras, Demosthenes, Hippocratic writers, Albert the Great, Aristophanes, and Xenophon, among others. His deployment of the concept of understanding captures important features of practical wisdom: that it grasps the truth, as well as “the why” behind those truths; that it integrates the general with the particular; that it grasps the connections among different practical values and goals; that it involves thinking successfully and getting things right across contexts and over a complete life; and, of course, that it is a major intellectual accomplishment, and therefore a virtue in Aristotelian terms.

Finally, Jagannathan positions his interpretation as a way of addressing long-standing debates in Aristotle’s ethics and epistemology. His main focus is the debate between “anti-intellectualists”, who think phronêsis does not include a grasp of universals, and “intellectualists”, who think phronêsis is an ethical science with universal principles. Jagannathan describes practical understanding as sharing key features with both anti-intellectualism and intellectualism about phronêsis, thus offering a third way out of the controversy.

Let me elaborate on these core features of the book in each of its chapters.

“Deflationism About Practical Knowledge” opens the book with some philosophical context for Jagannathan’s thesis that Aristotelian practical wisdom is practical understanding. Jagannathan situates the Nicomachean Ethics in response to a deflationary view of practical wisdom that he finds in Isocrates and Protagoras: the view that practical wisdom is not knowledge, but merely fallible, intuitive guesswork about what to do. Deflationism about phronêsis is motivated, Jagannathan argues, by two points.

First, practical matters are unclear and unstable. And second, practical matters are unclear and unstable because there are no objective facts about what is good or bad, only shifting conventions about what seems good or bad to a group of people. Jagannathan argues that Aristotle agrees with the deflationist about the first point, but that he denies the second point by invoking “for the most part” principles. “For the most part” principles are facts about mind-independent reality that can be known, and can give us practical knowledge of what to do by giving us explanations or “reasons why” certain things are to be done (or not), or are good (or bad), “for the most part”. Aristotelian practical knowledge, Jagannathan argues, is concerned with these “for the most part” principles and regularities.

“Ethical Experience in the Nicomachean Ethics” advances Jagannathan’s account of practical wisdom by exploring a key step in its development: gaining ethical experience (empeiria). Ethical experience, Jagannathan argues, is an ordinary form of practical knowledge, arising from good habituation, by which we know that certain things are true: that general facts about the human good are true; that specific things are to be done in specific circumstances (which involves “deliberative competence”); and that such-and-such techniques reliably helps us do those things. Such knowledge-that ensures significant success in performing the actions required by virtue.

Still, ethical experience does not rise to the level of practical wisdom or ethical understanding. Though it grasps generalities about the human good and how to apply those generalities in particular cases, ethical experience does not grasp the generalities as reasons why specific actions should be done. Thankfully, Jagannathan argues, ethical experience gives us the right starting point from which to inquire fruitfully and productively into the “reasons why”, and ultimately, to gain practical wisdom.

“The Nature of the Virtues of Thought” is Jagannathan’s account of what makes practical wisdom a virtue. He identifies three main features that make phronêsis a genuine virtue of thought: (1) phronêsis and its exercise are choiceworthy ends in themselves; (2) phronêsis achieves the goal of one of our intellectual capacities, namely, the goal of practical truth; and (3) phronêsis meets Aristotle’s “Independent Agency Requirement” on being a virtue. In support of (1), Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom is choiceworthy as an architectonic, prescriptive state that organizes our practical and technical activities in light of the human good. IIn support of (2), he argues that truth is the goal of all of our intellectual capacities as such, and that practical truth is the specific goal of our capacity for thinking about contingent matters. Practical wisdom is the state in which we are guaranteed to grasp practical truth, which is exemplified in virtuous choices that combine virtuous desires with excellent deliberative thinking. And in support of (3), Jagannathan argues that in order for practical wisdom to organize all our practical activities in light of the human good, it must be a state we ourselves have. Phronêsis could not do this merely by relying on virtuous others. In all three respects, therefore, practical wisdom is a genuine virtue of thought.

“Practical Understanding and Ethical Science” argues that practical wisdom is not an Aristotelian science (epistêmê). Jagannathan develops his account of Aristotelian phronêsis as a third option in the debate between “intellectualist” and “anti-intellectualist” interpretations of phronêsis—between those who say practical wisdom is a science, and those who deny that practical wisdom involves any universal and explanatory knowledge.

His focus in this chapter is to oppose intellectualist readings, which hold that phronêsis is some kind of ethical science. Jagannathan argues that science and practical wisdom differ in their characteristic outputs (demonstration vs. action); in whether they consist in a grasp of particulars (phronêsis does in part; epistêmê does not); in the precision with which they grasp universal principles and causes (less precisely for phronêsis, more precisely for epistêmê); and in the metaphysics of the principles and causes they grasp (“for the most part” for phronêsis; universal and necessary for epistêmê). Based on these differences, Jagannathan argues that no part of practical wisdom is scientific knowledge. In fact, he says, these differences show that “the character of understanding differs based on the domain”: practical wisdom and scientific knowledge are understanding of different domains—the domains of contingent matters, and matters with unchanging, necessary principles—but these differences in what they are understanding of also make them different qua understanding (104). As such, no part of ethical understanding is scientific and vice versa.

“Knowledge of Practical Universals” continues the argument from Chapter 4 by identifying what Jagannathan thinks “anti-intellectualists” have gotten wrong about practical wisdom: practical wisdom, on his view, includes universal and explanatory knowledge. This is so, he argues, because practical wisdom includes an understanding of the characteristic goals of virtuous action, i.e., of the actions prescribed by the virtues of character. Such goals are universal in that they are non-situation-specific (they are determinable); and they are explanatory principles in that they help the practically wise person to understand why such-and-such an action should be done in a specific situation, in a specific manner, and at a specific time. Jagannathan motivates his point with an interpretation of the virtue of particular justice and its characteristic goal. But of course, a well-lived, virtuous life pursues many practical goals. Jagannathan emphasizes that, in addition to the characteristic goals of all the character virtues, the practically wise person also understands the single, overarching goal of practical wisdom: eupraxia, acting well and successfully. However, he argues that eupraxia is not a separate goal that the practically wise person understands. Rather, the characteristic goals of virtuous action are understood by the practically wise person as different ways of achieving eupraxia. Understanding these goals, in turn, “grounds and orients” the excellent deliberation that leads a practically wise person to practical truth and virtuous choices.

The book’s final chapter, “Political Wisdom”, further supports Jagannathan’s argument from Chapter 5 that practical wisdom involves understanding practical universals. Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom (phronêsis) and political wisdom (politikê) are, for Aristotle, the same state of understanding applied to different contexts: to an individual life and to life in a political community, respectively. They are the same understanding because they understand the same subject matter, namely, the human good.

On the basis of the identity between phronêsis and politikê, Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom involves understanding universals because political wisdom does, in the form of laws that it crafts. Civic laws are universal in the sense that they apply to a range of situations, and wise rulers must understand which laws are good and why, insofar as they promote the human good—the ultimate goal of politics. In order to deliberate wisely about, identify, and choose good laws, then, a political ruler “requires an articulate understanding of the goals proper to human flourishing” (167). But Jagannathan has argued in previous chapters that this understanding is practical wisdom. Insofar as practical wisdom, applied to politics, is expressed in the formation and prescription of general laws, it follows that practical wisdom involves an understanding of general, non-situation-specific truths about the human good.

Let me now raise a question that readers may want to consider as they engage with Jagannathan’s work.

Is practical understanding true? In contemporary philosophy, we might debate whether understanding is always true and factive, or whether we can understand false or fictional things. In the context of Aristotle’s epistemology, though, it seems clear that the intellectual achievement of understanding would have to be true. The Nicomachean Ethics says this is the case for epistêmê: science or scientific understanding is always true (1139a15-18). Jagannathan rightly notices that in the very same passage, Aristotle also identifies phronêsis as a state in which we grasp the truth—specifically, practical truth. On Jagannathan’s interpretation, however, practical truth is specifically found “in virtuous choice”, which combines virtuous wish for an end with excellent deliberation about what to do in pursuit of that end (96). But even if phronêsis guarantees that we grasp practical truth and make virtuous choices, it is not clear, on Jagannathan’s interpretation, whether everything else we understand with phronêsis is true. For instance, as we have seen, he argues that phronêsis includes an understanding of our practical ends.

But is this understanding true? It seems odd (in an Aristotelian context) to deny that the phronimos grasps the truth about which ends are worth pursuing in life. But if ends are not choices (prohaireseis), our understanding of them would not be practically true. Would our understanding of ends be true in some other way, and if so, in what way? Jagannathan also says that “it is a mark of practical wisdom” to identify salient specific features of a practical situation in which we are trying to achieve a virtuous goal (143). But again, if salient particulars are not choices, does practical understanding help us discover the truth about them? Again, it seems odd (in an Aristotelian context) to deny that the phronimos grasps the truth about the salient particulars that could help them achieve their ends. But if our grasp of salient particulars is not practically true, is it true in some other way? And if phronêsis specifically guarantees that we grasp the truth in the sense of practical truth, but our grasp of ends and salient particulars is not practically true, how can a practically wise person be sure of grasping these other truths? Such questions about the relationship between truth, practical truth, and practical understanding are left open by Jagannathan’s interpretation.

REFERENCES

Annas, Julia, 1981, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, New York: Oxford University Press.

Burnyeat, Myles, 1980, “Socrates and the Jury: Paradoxes in Plato’s Distinction between Knowledge and True Belief”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement, 54: 173–191.

—, 1981, “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge”, in Aristotle on Science: The Posterior Analytics, Enrico Berti (ed.), Padua: Editrice Antenoire, pp. 359–384.

Moravcsik, Julius, 1979, “Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie, 15: 53–69.

Moss, Jessica, 2020, “Is Plato’s Epistemology About Knowledge?” in Hetherington and Smith (eds.) What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, New York: Routledge: 68–85.

Schwab, Whitney, 2016, “Understanding Epistēmē in Plato’s Republic”, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 51, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 41–86.

–––, 2020, “Plato’s Ideal Epistemology”, in in Hetherington and Smith (eds.) What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, New York: Routledge: 86–105.

Entering these complex dynamics, Song shifts the discourse, asking not how Eurocentric philosophy should accommodate others but rather how a “Ruist comparative theology” might encounter, engage, and evaluate diverse traditions. His use of "Ruist," referring to the lineage of scholars or literati, reflects his preference for a more etymologically accurate translation of Chinese terms typically rendered as “Confucianism.” Part of Song's approach to comparative theology is rooted in Ruism’s historical interactions with European theologians dating back to the 1500s; part reflects Song’s constructive project aimed at presenting Ruism as a contemporary philosophy and way of life.

The first two chapters establish Song’s theoretical lens on theology, especially related to the use of this term in a Chinese context. In “Comparative Theology as a Liberal Art”, Song encourages contemporary scholars to look back to the pre-Christian use of theology in Aristotle’s work to reclaim both the existential valence and pluralistic openness of the term. Likewise, in “Comparative Theology as a Science”, Song returns to the Greeks to revive a sense of the spiritual dimensions of observation and inquiry as parts of a larger philosophical lifeway.

In taking readers outside certain ossified truisms about assumed differences between the so-called East and West, Song relies on the work of Pierre Hadot to help build his vision of Greek philosophy as a tradition largely in agreement with Ruism in practice, if not always in theory. By framing theology as a component of a pre-Christian philosophical lifeway that conducted rational inquiry and empirical observation as spiritual exercises, Song allows us to imagine Ruist interventions in current discourse. What if the influence of Church doctrine had not shorn philosophy of its spiritual components and separated it from theology? What if Europe’s modernist trajectory had not veered toward a reductive scientism and splintered off so many separate disciplines from the broad-ranging philosophy of the Greeks? In a sense, Ruism gives us glimpses of other directions our own discourse might have gone had “Western” thought not taken these specific historical twists and turns.

I say this is imaginative because, of course, Greek and Chinese scholars were not in communication with each other during the period at which there might have been the greatest overlap. Song’s third chapter, “The Transcendence Debate in the History of Christian-Ru Interaction”, picks up at the point of first contact, namely, encounters between literati in the latter half of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and Catholic clergy whose sense of “theology” was already quite distant from Aristotle’s. Song traces the debates over transcendence to the work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and associated missionaries, who were deeply impressed by (and conversant in) China’s rich classical heritage but who nonetheless sought to establish that the ultimacy of Taiji 太極 (which Song translates as Ultimate Limit) was, indeed, not ultimate enough. This is the beginning of the debate: “For them [i.e., Catholic missionaries], the Christian God was more transcendent since He alone could be the origin of cosmic realities, including the reality of Taiji” (56).

Song then traces the discourse through the work of James Legge (1815–1897) and into a range of twentieth century and contemporary scholars, including Christian theologians (such as Hyo-Dong Lee), Ruist philosophers (such as Tu Wei-ming), and comparativists (such as David L. Hall, Roger T. Ames, and Robert Cummings Neville). Here, Song’s careful parsing is extraordinarily helpful in disambiguating the layers of miscommunication that have accrued in the debates over time.

As he shows, many scholars talk past each other, using different definitions of transcendence and hence not directly addressing opposing viewpoints. Likewise, many scholars are rooted in specific Ruist schools and do not necessarily clarify how this shapes their positions in the debates. That is, as Song insightfully discusses, one will have a very different Ruist answer to the question of transcendence if one is implicitly drawing from Zhang Zai (1020–1077) versus Zhu Xi (1130–1200), or, relatedly, if one is not engaging Song dynasty developments in Ruism at all. Song’s overview moves quickly, but he provides several helpful charts that allow readers to see overarching dynamics. He draws out at least four uses of transcendence at play in the debates: “something determinate and ontologically unconditioned”; “something indeterminate and ontologically unconditioned”; “something constantly advancing” beyond present conditions; and “something beyond humans” that is the source human life and the origin of moral values (68).

Song indicates that his concern is with the first two senses. That is, his book investigates the question of whether Taiji or Tian might be considered an ontologically independent creator who brings forth the existing cosmos out of nothing. To disambiguate the debates, Song proposes to provide a thorough historical overview of the development of the concept of creatio ex nihilo in Christian thought and the concept of sheng sheng 生生, or “birth, birth”, in Chinese thought. This occupies the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters.

First, however, Song spends the fourth chapter addressing questions of method by surveying methodological options drawn from the areas of comparative theology, comparative religion, and comparative philosophy of religion. Drawing on his use of theology established earlier, he refers to his own method of Ruist comparative theology “as a rooted, nonconfessional, and scientific liberal art” (85). He identifies his central hermeneutic tools as the notions of “vague category” (drawn from Neville’s Piercean semiotics) and “situational thinking” (drawn from Jonathan Z. Smith’s Wittgensteinian approach to the study of religion). At this point, I would have been interested to hear some of Song’s methodological commitments articulated in the language of Ruist scholarly practices, although this dimension is implicit in Song’s overall approach to Ruism as a way of life in other chapters.

With his methodology in place, Song investigates creatio ex nihilo from Plato through Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and sheng sheng from Confucius through Zhu Xi and later Ming dynasty interpreters and critics. This culminates in Song’s assessment of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics in reference to sheng sheng as an expression not of creatio ex nihilo but generatio ex nihilo. Unlike those competing scholars whom Song refers to as Qi-monists, Zhu Xi asserts what Song describes as the ontological priority of Li (pattern-principle) with respect to Qi (vital-energy).

Song further differentiates, however, two senses of Li suggested by Zhu’s work, namely, Li as existing patterns in a Qi-based cosmos and Li as Taiji or Ultimate Limit, “the ultimate creative power that generates all possible vital-energies and their pattern-principles” (235). As Song notes, Zhu Xi does not make this distinction consistently. Accordingly, Song argues against conflating Li and Taiji. By maintaining this distinction, Song says, we gain a picture of Zhu’s mature metaphysics in which Taiji is the indeterminate and ontologically independent source of Li and Qi. Song’s final position in the transcendence debates asserts the similarity between the Zhu Xi lineage of Ruism and what Song calls a minor (as opposed to mainstream) strand of Christian theology, namely, “the de-anthropomorphic understandings of divine creation in Schleiermacher’s and Tillich’s thought” (237).

Throughout the book, Song refers to Ruist comparative theology as a “seeded, open inclusivism” that avoids the totalizing trajectory often problematized in critical discourses on transcendence. In particular, at various points in his argument, Song addresses those critics who might say that Christian theology and Western metaphysics, relying on the language of transcendence, have both been implicated in Europe’s imperialist and colonialist projects, and he defends his understanding of transcendence in Ruism in light of these concerns.

In his concluding chapter, he sums up his responses to a variety of voices in the transcendence debates, applies his Ruist comparative theology to a selection of other issues (such as theodicy), and indicates directions for future research (especially more investigation into the question of transcendence for the Qi-focused lineages of Ruism, which play less of a role in Song’s book, but which perhaps accord with strands of European thought that privilege the language of immanence and process). As Song insightfully points out, his own comparison has been carefully delimited in recognition of the diversity of thought across both Chinese and European contexts, making any essentialized picture of “East” and “West” untenable (262).

Given how entrenched scholars may be on one side or another in the transcendence debates, possibly Song’s book will change no minds. Nonetheless, no matter where a given reader stands, I would recommend this book broadly to anyone working in Chinese philosophy, sinology, comparative theology, and related areas. Many features of Song’s argument are compelling on their own, regardless of the debates, such as his careful parsing of Matteo Ricci’s Chinese sources, his reconstruction of Zhu Xi’s mature thought, and his overall methodological lens on Ruist comparative theology. This book marks the successful culmination of a research trajectory that Song has been developing for many years and that promises fruitful conversations to come.

Although these proposals will strike some as radical, even skeptical readers will find much of interest in Guerrero’s diagnosis of the failures of electoral democracy. He insightfully catalogues its flaws and shows how hard it would be to address them satisfactorily; even so, his contention that the failures are endemic has been notably criticized by Landa and Pevnick (2025). Readers will also find much of interest in the elaboration of his lottocratic proposals. Here, he succeeds in his aim of showing that lottocratic institutions are feasible and promising without getting bogged down in canvassing the contingent obstacles to their implementation. Guerrero works out the details of his proposal with great care and circumspection, displaying an admirable balance of idealism and realism.

Of even greater interest, to my mind, is Guerrero’s original approach to institutional evaluation. The argumentative strategy of the book is to compare the merits of electoral and non-electoral institutions on the basis of a functional standard of success, combined with the deployment of other normative standards of political morality, such as rights and equality. I will focus my remarks on Guerrero’s account of institutional success because it is so philosophically rich in its own terms and also because it is crucial for establishing his core conclusions.

Political Functionalism and Institutional Capacities

First, in order to avoid stacking the deck (or seeming to) against electoral institutions, Guerrero develops and defends a standard for assessing governmental institutions that he calls political functionalism. It is a welcome departure from the tired dichotomies that otherwise characterize democratic theory—liberty vs. equality, procedure vs. outcomes, procedure vs. substance. Instead, Guerrero argues that institutions should be evaluated holistically based on how well they enable citizens to solve practical problems of moral significance that arise from the “human political condition” (35). These include the promotion of “wellbeing, individual autonomy, social equality, and justice”, as well as the protection of “certain moral rights of individuals and communities” (30). However, defining a function around such general aims proves difficult. It must also accommodate the variety and complexity of problems that communities might face.

Therefore, Guerrero adopts a form of political contextualism, according to which we should never conclude that an institution will be effective for a given society without first taking into account certain facts about that society, including factors such as its education level and the degree of “racial, cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and religious diversity” it exhibits (38). While Guerrero thinks that claims about the merits of political systems can be fully objective and evaluator-independent, he stresses that they are conditional and “contextually relative” (40).

How, then, can the virtues of lottocracy be shown while upholding both political functionalism and political contextualism? Guerrero’s solution is to shift the focus to institutional capacities. He thinks that since all institutions will need certain basic capacities in order to function, institutions can be evaluated on the basis of having these capacities. But whenever capacities are used as a basis of evaluation, a whole host of theoretical problems arise. The first concerns how we are to think of multi-element or multi-dimensional capacities. At one point, for instance, Guerrero says the capacities include weighing evidence “accurately and appropriately” (42). Assuming these two goals are distinct, can or should they be jointly maximized, and at what cost to other capacities?

A second challenge concerns how we are to factor in resource scarcity. In the case of an individual agent, it is important to develop a sense of when the time has come to stop deliberating and act. But whenever agency is distributed and institutionalized, how can we say in general what amount and format of deliberation will manifest the capacities conducive to effective action?

A third challenge appears when we consider time horizons. A group of novices may find it preferable to adopt a structure in which the development of their capacities is slower but more resilient because they utilize the learning process to improve their judgment. In such cases, the capacity to expand one’s capacities is also, technically, a capacity. Not enough is said to address these sorts of challenges.

Nor is it clear how shifting the focus to capacities permits us to make comparisons that are sufficiently sensitive to context. On the one hand, when Guerrero urges a genuine respect for complexity and contextualism, he seems to accept a commitment to endogenous specifications of functionalities. But once we have that kind of genuine contextualism, it’s very difficult to know from the outside how to compare. If, for example, we were to look at two different societies’ ways of balancing liberty and rights, we would not be in a position to compare the pair in terms of capacities for effective functioning instructively, as long as effective functioning is defined in terms of solving a unique set of moral-political problems in a given society. But the whole point of the project is to make a meaningful comparison between types of institutions. So there has to be some context-independence in the standard of success. But the more committed we become to one definite construal of capacities, the less contextualist we will be. Whereas shifting the focus to capacities had promised to be an escape from the challenges of context and complexity, in the end it seems to give rise to its own set of problems.

To my mind, these shortcomings limit the applicability of Guerrero’s approach to evaluating institutions. The adoption of political functionalism had promised to make comparative assessments of institutional forms tractable, but once it is combined with political contextualism, it seems that we are no better off. It also leads to an awkward rhetorical tone in which the author urges us to reserve judgment on almost everything because of the twin issues of complexity and context, even while displaying confidence in the overall capacity of lottocracy to address these very issues.

The Deployment of Other Normative Concepts

In addition to his advocacy of political functionalism as a standard for institutional assessment, Guerrero presents a suite of other normative concepts by which institutions can also be judged, such as equality and responsiveness. Here, Guerrero adopts a method we may call “strategic disambiguation”. First, he gathers up a more or less comprehensive list of things he expects readers to care about in political morality, such as justice, rights, equality, autonomy, etc., with the aim of showing that on each dimension, lottocratic institutions would perform no worse, and may in fact perform better, than electoral ones do. Taking them one by one, he disambiguates each concept into its possible plausible formulations. For example, when it comes to ‘political equality’, Guerrero spells out 10 possible things we could mean. Then he argues that some of the disambiguated formulations of equality can be eliminated because they would make the normative concept unattractive or infeasible, and, among the ones remaining, lottocracy fares well enough (315-324).

Such a strategy allows Guerrero to defend lottocracy while minimizing the need to commit to any particular concept of political equality. This ecumenically non-committal strategy has the virtue of not alienating a reader who happens to have a different conception of equality than the author does. But it also seems oddly coincidental that the only viable conceptions of equality, in this exercise, turn out to be the ones that fit with lottocracy. The reader feels as if they are being sold a new jacket on the grounds that, among all the possible settings in which they would wear it, the only ones where it wouldn’t be suitable are places that they wouldn’t want to go anyway. Just a coincidence?

Two instances of this exercise in strategic disambiguation left me particularly dissatisfied. One occurred during the discussion of responsiveness and accountability, which was otherwise quite insightful (334-344). Here, Guerrero points out that what it means for a decision maker to be morally accountable is different from what it means for them to be politically accountable. The latter normative concept, he thinks, once it has been fully isolated from the former, is not all that valuable. And, he thinks, while moral accountability is valuable, once it has been fully disentangled from notions of political accountability, the value of moral accountability is every bit as realizable under lottocratic institutions as under electoral ones. His prising apart of the moral and political dimensions of accountability, however useful on its own, makes it harder to appreciate the value of their combination. Often political accountability can foster moral accountability, and this is part of why we value it.

Another instance in which the strategic disambiguation exercise proves unsatisfying is Guerrero’s discussion of participation. Guerrero admits that it might seem that lottocratic institutions offer citizens fewer outlets to get involved in issues that move them, thereby neglecting a core democratic value. His response is to pose the philosophical question: what is valuable in the first place about an individual’s ability to participate in politics? Assuming that it is about having a say, he points out that the lifetime odds of serving a turn in a lottocratic institution (roughly 12%) is an opportunity that is more meaningful than the vanishingly small odds of influencing an electoral outcome (326-329). On the other hand, if it is about political advocacy, he says, then the opportunities under lottocratic institutions are more or less equivalent to things as they now stand. By the end of the exercise, Guerrero has factored out the elements of participation in such a way that whatever makes them valuable is addressed just as well by lottocratic institutions as by electoral ones. Again, one may ask: just a coincidence?

It’s useful for Guerrero to separate out and zoom in on these aspects of participation, but the segmentation of conceptual space makes it harder to see the big picture. People’s desire to participate—to ‘have a say’ in the decisions that affect them—is not necessarily about shaping policy in any determinate way. Sometimes, folks just want a ready outlet to express their dissatisfaction. Casting a vote for a certain party or candidate can be a way of registering discontent, but such ‘protest votes’ can also affect the development of a party platform. Voting affords both opportunities at once. If electoral participation opportunities can be good in multiple ways, their value may amount to more than the sum of their parts by virtue of their convergence.

It's even more evident that something gets lost in such segmentation exercises when Guerrero considers political participation on the part of groups organized to counter other groups with whom they disagree. Here, his segmentation strategy focuses on why we find group conflict concerning. He separates out three possible answers (330-332). First, if the disagreement is substantive and reasonable, he argues, it is more likely to get the public reckoning it deserves in a SILL than in an election. If it is not, then, secondly, the concern is about how to get political losers to accept their losses. There, he figures, the acceptance of loss in an electoral system depends to a large degree on the perceived fairness of the system. And such a perception of fairness, for him, is just as available for lottocracy as for elections. A third possibility would be cases of ‘us versus them’, i.e., pure group conflict. Then, he reasons, the grounds for optimism are thin across the board—across all the institutional options.

Again, Guerrero’s strategy of separating things out presupposes that each element of his segmentation can be analyzed conclusively when taken on its own. But what if their combination is equally important? In some cases, such as protection of minority languages, a group’s perception of being overlooked is related to the objective fact of their being overlooked, so it matters that the resolution is both fair and accepted as such. Furthermore, as can be seen with trade union strikes, sometimes the clash is both a pure group conflict and a substantive and reasonable disagreement. The opposition of propertied and propertyless classes is a perennial source of factionalization in politics, as James Madison observed. Although political dynamics can unnecessarily amplify the perception, the interests of the two classes are genuinely opposed. Assessing the adequacy of a solution to one aspect of the problem, i.e., the perception, is not independent of the adequacy of the solution to the other aspect, i.e., the real opposition of interests. Guerrero’s strategy of segmentation misses this important point.

Now, no analysis can capture everything, but there is a pattern that emerges from seeing what has been left out. Guerrero’s framework, to my mind, rests on a picture of governance according to which political competition (including bargaining) simply is not part of what makes institutions effective at problem solving. Why accept this picture?

As John Stuart Mill observed, the incorporation of healthy antagonism among those making the decisions can improve the quality of governance. The thought is that the competition for power, the rivalries, and even the tribalism can actually have a positive role in functional terms. Mill argues accordingly that Parliament should be organized so as to enable members to form a locus of organized opposition. There should be a pont d’appui, as he calls it: a focal point for the opposition to find its footing, a place from which it can push back against prevailing views. For Mill, a deliberative body can avoid the slow drift towards “collective mediocrity” only when there is a backstop against groupthink provided by those members who are incentivized simply to obstruct. His point is that only by accepting some unproductive friction can an institution reap the benefits of productive friction.

A lottocratic system, however, is designed to banish this sort of healthy antagonism. The whole point is to limit decision-making to certain deliberative contexts that are shielded from power differences, echoing Habermas’s dream of realizing a Herrschaft-free deliberative sphere. The practice of legislative bargaining, for example, seems to be eschewed as a method of policy-making (despite briefly acknowledging the practice of ‘logrolling’, in which certain bills are bundled with others in order to seal a negotiated compromise between opposing factions). Lottocratic institutions also shield deliberative bodies from the dynamics of political competition that operate in the wider society.

Under lottocracy, there is no obvious outlet for mass movements of reform. Those who are animated by the energies of opposition, resistance, and revolution lack an organizational structure through which they might have their reform aims articulated and pursued effectively. In some circumstances, the stability and cohesion of the society can be jeopardized by the lack of an outlet for mass movements. A leaderless democracy is not a ship that can be redirected; it cannot have a new course set for it by way of a groundswell. The possibility of schism is the first and most important problem to be solved in politics. For someone so concerned with the function of problem solving, Guerrero seems surprisingly unconcerned with political stability as such.

Perhaps Guerrero’s defense of lottocracy is intended to rest on a wholesale rejection of the potential for political competition to enhance institutional performance. If the rejection of this potential is not wholesale, however, and if it is admitted that it may have potential benefits, then shouldn’t these benefits be put into the balance with other factors when arguing for the superiority of lottocracy? Ideally, a new approach to institutional evaluation would give us a way not only to weigh and balance but also to integrate and reconcile the different normative standards that are relevant. Whatever the merits of Guerrero’s ecumenical and multi-factorial approach to institutional evaluation, allowing us to make an all-things-considered rating of the merit of an institutional form is not one of them.

This point echoes earlier concerns about adopting a methodology that seeks to honor complexity in all its forms. A defense of lottocracy in comparative terms would not be intelligible unless we had a legitimate basis for the comparison. Guerrero’s argumentative strategy, however, is to say that while things are mind-bogglingly complicated in certain respects, they are simplifiable enough to hold that lottocracy is defensible with respect to every consideration that might matter for political morality, at least in the circumstances we are familiar with today. To my mind, lottocracy can be defended with a strategy that emphasizes simplicity, or a strategy that emphasizes complexity, but not both at the same time. Guerrero’s mixture, along with the ecumenical deployment of normative standards like equality, makes the whole amount to less than the sum of its individually impressive parts. Guerrero’s project seeks to do justice to the complexity of institutional evaluation, but the particular simplifications and streamlinings seem to be a product of his pre-existing commitment to lottocratic empowerment as the best mode of governing.

In the end, what may explain Guerrero’s loyalty to lottocratic rule is not a hard-nosed political functionalism but a latent ethics of power. At one point, he observes that a member of a minority group may feel obligated as an elected representative to give special consideration to the effects of a political decision on their fellow group members. But under lottocracy, Guerrero says, no one is required to exercise power in this way nor even be tempted to feel that they should (336-337).

The idea seems to be that under lottocratic institutions, no one empowered to rule owes their empowerment to anyone else, so they are free to do what seems best. He illustrates this with a plane crash thought experiment, in which the small number of unhurt victims are suddenly thrown into a position of guardianship, responsible for exercising judgment on behalf of the larger group of stranded survivors (170). These remarks suggest that Guerrero is as interested in the ethical basis of empowerment as he is in its functional consequences. Be that as it may, Guerrero is right to remind us that lottocracy has a privileged relationship to an egalitarian ethos of empowerment. As Plato observed in the Laws, whenever lottery-based empowerment is instituted as legitimate, that is because it is recognized by a particular community as a way of imperfectly ratifying their positive commitment to political equality, not because it uniquely corresponds to moral or natural equality (690e, 757e).

The timing of Guerrero’s intervention is superb, as devotees of the democratic ideal have lost the moral high ground in recent years. The defenders of democracy are on the back foot, now being forced to play as much defense as they used to play offense. Guerrero’s sympathetic critique of democracy is therefore most welcome, even if what the book has to say about democracy’s moral foundations is not entirely new. Entirely innovative, however, are the theoretical interventions made by Guerrero when it comes to assessing institutions across a wide variety of political contexts. Along the way, he capably develops and defends a standard of legitimacy not wedded to democracy, a standard of institutional reform that is anchored in sensible functioning rather than in public justification or accountability, and a way of thinking about the protection of minority groups that recognizes difference without promoting tribalism. Although the overall analysis has its shortcomings, anyone interested in political theory will find this original and stimulating book richly rewarding.

REFERENCES

Landa, Dimitri, and Ryan Pevnick. 2025. “Should We Be Lottocrats?” Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs 1(2).

Plato. Laws. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. 2022. Hackett Publishing Company.

Melissa Zinkin’s Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason is only one of the most recent attempts to secure the common principle or function that will lay bare the unity of the Kantian conception of the faculty of reason. It joins a diverse list of entries: reason’s regulative use in positing the practical postulates of God, soul and freedom (Pauline Kleingeld, Paul Guyer); practical reason’s ultimate object: the highest good (Jens Timmermann); the categorial imperative (Onora O’Neill, Alix Cohen); the standard of healthy human understanding (Melissa Merritt); a conception of reason as ‘comprehension’, understood a capacity for a specific kind of systematic understanding (Karl Schafer) and the principle of purposiveness (Sabina Vaccarino Bremner).

Every attempt to discover the hidden key to the unity of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies is ambitious, and Zinkin’s is no exception. Zinkin argues that what unifies reason is a principle, the principle of systematicity, which is the principle of “deep cognition and comprehension” (248). When reason judges in accordance with this principle, its judgments, theoretical and practical, have cognitive depth. (Zinkin’s argument thus, in its broad outlines, closely resembles Karl Schafer’s recent argument in Kant’s Reason: the Unity of Reason and the Limits of Comprehension in Kant, and indeed, it would have been helpful to hear more from Zinkin herself about how she views the differences between them.)

According to Zinkin’s Kant, human beings ought not only form correct judgments regarding the world, works of art and what to do but “become deep thinkers” (185), which means thinkers who strive not only to know what things are but why they are so: why horses are mammals, human beings rational and good actions good. Characterizing our mental lives as intrinsically aiming at depth is an attractive proposition, but I worry that the way Zinkin finds room for it in Kant risks depriving our so-called ordinary epistemic and moral lives of rationality itself.

The book is divided into two parts, dedicated to Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, respectively, with about half of the first part dedicated to Kant’s reflections on aesthetic judgment in the third Critique. In its pages, Zinkin illuminatingly weighs in on a number of open questions, e.g., Kant’s seven levels of cognition (Ch.1), the moral worth of Huckleberry Finn’s refusal to turn Jim in, contrary to his conception of his duty (Ch.5), and the transition from Section I to Section II in the Groundwork (Ch. 6). Limitations of space prevent me from going into these discussions’ interesting details, and I will have to limit myself to introducing and commenting on her central, broadest claims.

Zinkin is on surest footing in her treatment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. In the first chapter, Zinkin introduces the claim that, for Kant, reason is the faculty of deep systematic judgment, which she identifies with Kant’s account of both “comprehension” in the Jäsche Logic (9:65) and reflective judgment in the third Critique. Zinkin rightly emphasizes that Kant’s concern with reason is not merely a negative one: to deny us knowledge by means of reason of anything that is beyond the bounds of experience and restrict the use of reason to a formal logical function as the store of the rules of inference. Rather, reason emerges as “a transcendental faculty that contains the conditions for the possibility of the cognition of objects”, where the cognition in question is not that of determinative judgments about what things are but “the insight into or comprehension of why something is what it is, that is, its organizing principle” (47).

The welcome redemption of reason comes, however, at a high cost. Zinkin asserts a sharp distinction between ordinary determinative judgments of experience and reflective judgments of reason: while determinative judgments are superficial, relying on “pre-given” concepts, deep reflective judgments are ones that employ concepts I “discover for myself”. This is the distinction between making the judgment x is p, say an animal is a mammal, because “it matches a description I have read in a book” (72), and making the same judgment “by discovering for myself that it has mammary glands.”

In the second judgment, “I, myself, have acquired the reason for making this judgment” (72). We already encounter a difficulty: even if there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the way in which I know most mammals, i.e., by learning about them from others, and the way I know those few where I happen to have had the occasion to observe the presence of their mammary glands “for myself”, is it right to think of the latter, DIY concepts, as inherently less superficial than the former, which I obtained from experts via written text?

Zinkin goes so far as to claim that ordinary determinative judgments are “mechanical and automatic, determined by habit or some already-given concept” (84). And correspondingly claims that when we judge determinatively, we judge “unreflectively and automatically, as when I am influenced by prejudice” (85). This seems to fly in the face of Kant’s profound concern with securing the rationality of our judgments, the sort of rationality that makes them fit to be the basis of inferences.

By contrast, for Zinkin, deep cognition amounts to cognitive “Freedom”: “the flexibility to apply what we have learned to new contexts—to think further and more deeply about something” (80-81fn14). The strong contrast between ordinary determinative judgments and deep ones threatens to preclude the expansion from one to the other since, and this I take to be of Kant’s most basic lessons, the gap between the mechanical and automatic and the rational is not one that can be easily bridged.

It is, of course, undeniable that our conceptual mastery can expand, as when a basic ability to identify, say, a dog, by a few basic characteristics of its appearance and behavior, develops into a broader and more systematic grasp not only of its form of life but also animal life in general, the division into species and genera, the history of human’s manipulation of dog’s breeds, etc. At the same time, we want an account of this development to illuminate the possibility of this development. This is precisely what characterizing basic determinative judgments in an empiricist fashion as “mechanical” and “automatic” obscures.

Moreover, while in learning what makes dogs dogs, I am deepening my understanding; arguably, the possibility of this expansion is already implicit in my basic determinative judgment. It is, in other words, constitutive of my basic, initial determinative judgments that they can be expanded by means of my gaining further information about what makes things the things they are.

And, finally, the process by which I come to know more things about dogs than I did initially is often no different than the one by which I came to learn to make my initial, simple judgment: by means of others. If I go deep sea diving, I may first consult a quick guide to identify a new life form I have never heard of, but surely in order to expand that knowledge, I am not really required to perform any experiments myself. I may continue to rely on others, my diving instructor, the authors of my guides, as I grow my understanding of this life form and connect it, systematically, to the rest of my knowledge of marine life. This is not the contrast between “mechanical, superficial judgment” (90) and “good, deep judgment”. It is rather the transition from fully rational and adequate empirical judgment employing a rudimentary grasp of concepts to rational empirical judgments employing a better—we might say deeper—grasp of concepts.

Finally, if ordinary exercises of empirical judgment were defective in the way that Zinkin suggests, it would not only be a mystery how I go from the superficial to the deep myself, but it would be unclear how any humans have ever come to possess “comprehension”, for the mechanical prejudicial judgments would hardly be fit to perform the justificatory role that they must in the growing of our complex, systematic empirical knowledge, i.e., what Zinkin’s “comprehension” is all about.

Moving to aesthetic judgements, we find Zinkin assimilating them without remainder to the judgments of comprehension. Beautiful objects, Zinkin claims, give us pleasure because they “deepen our cognition”. The unity and coherence of the beautiful object is, however, not sui generis; it is rather “precisely the systematic unity of reason”, the unity that “makes comprehension possible” (108). Zinkin speculatively proposes that beautiful objects occasion the following cognitive process: we encounter a particular X (e.g., a human being), for which the understanding has a rule, Xs are Fs (e.g., a human being is a rational animal). Then the imagination comes up, of its own accord, with an image of something else, we know not why or wherefrom, that could serve as a possible counter example to the rule (in her example, a cyborg). This prompts a reflection on the original rule: “The imagination playfully asks, ‘Could this thing be an instance of that object (the human)?” (111)

Recall that this process of contemplating a counter example to a rule is meant to be the basis of the judgment, this X is beautiful. Indeed, Zinkin goes so far as to suggest that “for Kant genius is the ability to come up with a good counterexample” (113 fn39). But nowhere does Zinkin take up the question of how the alleged capacity of an object to provoke the imagination to come up with “counter examples” relates to any familiar conception of beauty.

For the sake of argument, let us accept this picture of what gaining further understanding of a concept entails (it is far from clear that we should: Kant’s attempt to answer what human beings are does not proceed by imagining counter examples but takes the form of, among other things, three Critiques of our mental faculties). Surely, any specimen of X, beautiful or otherwise, would do as a basis for the initiation of this kind of furthering of understanding. Why think that the beautiful horse provokes our imagination to come up with fanciful counterexamples more that an average one would?

With this, we arrive at Kant’s practical philosophy. Zinkin’s basic account here parallels the one she offers of his theoretical enterprise. The familiar distinction between performing an action from a motivation that can be traced to our self-love and performing it in recognition of a necessity that can be traced to the very form of our rational capacities is replaced with an internal distinction within moral motivation: the distinction between “superficial” moral motivation and “deep” one. Zinkin claims that this distinction is analogous to the distinction between a case where I do something inscrutable because a friend, whom I trust, instructs me to (“throw this egg outside right away!”) and a case where I understand the end that my action will promote.

In the same way, Zinkin claims, an agent can grasp their duty in an ordinary moral judgment “tentatively and mechanically” (128) or, when contemplating the end of moral action, deeply and systematically. What the end of moral action is exactly varies: one ought to act in order to “cause my will to be good” (158); “give its actions moral worth” (159); “for the sake of humanity” (159); “for the sake of its own reason” (162); to “promote my own rationality” (162) or further “my own rational nature as an end in itself” (163); for “the end of promoting one’s own rational nature ” (241); and “for the sake of humanity as an end in itself” (232). This seems not only to give up on the idea of securing the sense in which, in acting from consciousness of the moral law, we do something that is good for its own sake, but to get things backwards. We do not treat human beings as ends to cause our wills to be good, we treat them as ends because this is our duty, because this is what respect for the moral law means, because it is the right thing to do.

Now, to be sure, it is reasonable to suppose, as Zinkin does, that one is likely to be more motivated, if only because far less perplexed, where one has a sense of why one is to do what one should. And one welcome consequence of this position that should be mentioned is the idea that to respect someone’s humanity is to respect their capacity for deep thought (192). This means that what I owe another human being extends far beyond not interfering with their power to choose as they happen to see fit but includes treating others as capable of reflective thought and deep comprehension. It follows that respecting other rational agents implies a duty to provide them with the opportunities necessary to develop their cognitive capacities. Moreover, this means that it is not enough to not treat others as means in a technical sense, by obtaining bare consent by whatever means necessary; treating others as ends in themselves means engaging their capacities of understanding and judgment fully.

But it is far from clear that this distinction between the superficial moral judgments and deep ones is helpful in understanding the distinction between common moral cognition and the sort of moral cognition made possible by philosophical inquiry. In effect, Zinkin assimilates ordinary moral judgments, those I have not “thought through” in the relevant way, to actions performed merely in accordance with the law, not from recognition of duty but from empirical motives. Accordingly, and startlingly, she goes so far as to claim that ordinary moral judgments’ prescriptions are “arbitrary”, “not authoritative and cannot obligate us” (158), and therefore, acting in accordance with such moral judgments has no moral worth (196). The implications are intolerable: anyone without philosophical grasp of morality is not obligated by the moral law.

For his part, however, Kant insists on the moral adequacy and worth of common human reason and its moral cognition. In the introduction to the Groundwork, he writes that while common human reason may “not think so abstractive in a universal form”, it nevertheless has the moral principle “always before its eyes and uses [it] as the norm for its appraisals” (4:404). He goes on to insist that “all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason, and indeed in the most common reason just as in reason that is speculative in the highest degree” (4:411).

Philosophy is not required to make moral action possible: “I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good” (4:403). We need moral philosophy not because without it, ordinary moral judgments remain without worth, but because though ordinary people are “capable of the idea of a practical pure reason”, their moral judgments “remain subjects to all sorts of corruption” (4:390). Innocence, Kant writes, is “splendid”, but “it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced” (4:405). By articulating the principle of pure practical reason vividly, practical philosophy helps us defend against these temptations. None of this is to suggest that it is prima facie unacceptable to advance a different, heterodox interpretation, but it is to say that such apparently straightforward statements must be addressed, and a case must be at least attempted to explain why we should be on better exegetical or philosophical ground in overlooking them.

Returning to Guyer’s standard: if Zinkin describes a single conception of reason, as a faculty of cognitive depth in theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgment, I remain skeptical that it is Kant’s. Even so, Zinkin articulates a valuable idea: our rationality finds expression in our ambition not only to get things right but to gain further and further insight, by means of expanding and systemizing our knowledge, whether of the world or of how we should conduct ourselves in it. I remain hopeful that it is possible to find it in Kant, and articulate it philosophically, without dismissing so much of our ordinary, pre-philosophical mental lives.

REFERENCES

Guyer, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2, April 1997.

The book is written in a standard analytic philosophy style and is a perspicuous contribution to philosophical debates about paternalism. Wilkinson writes from the perspective of a trained philosopher who has spent time embedded in multidisciplinary academic departments that include public and population health scholars. While the book includes global examples, Wilkinson’s personal perspective is shaped by the public health systems he knows best, which have their own distinct flavor of public health practice and scope of authority. The book, or part of it, could function well in a public health ethics class. A prime audience would be a public health practitioner or policymaker who is curious about ethics and has taken some philosophical coursework.

The most important point in the book is the discussion of healthism, defined as the tendency to overvalue health and safety (14). Health is one important value that contributes to a good life. Health is instrumental to many important ends. But the relationship between health and wellbeing is not always straightforward and varies across persons. Intuitively, health is important to someone who wants to spend a long, active life outdoors and less important to an audiophile who, upon reflection, most wants to spend her weekends listening to records and getting high on heroin. Wilkinson shows how many public health writers effectively overlook values that can compete with health (such as pleasure or bonhomie) and assume that promoting health is on balance good for people, while threats to health are on balance bad for them. Concomitant with this is the assumption that people who choose unhealthy options choose mistakenly.

‘Wellbeing’ refers to how well someone’s life is going for them. Wilkinson bases his healthism arguments on a preference-based account of wellbeing, which says that a person’s wellbeing is determined by their ultimate preferences for their life (42-44). Subjectivist views like this contrast with objectivist accounts, which say that a person’s wellbeing is determined by the extent to which certain objectively determined values, such as love and knowledge, are present in their life. Wilkinson’s account doesn’t feel airtight. But this does not matter because all plausible views of wellbeing imply that sometimes making someone healthier renders them on balance worse off. Outlawing heroin may make the audiophile’s life worse, even as it improves her health and extends her life, because it frustrates her ultimate preferences or deprives her of objective values associated with her lifestyle.

Wilkinson argues that there is usually insufficient evidence to show that real-world paternalistic interventions make people better off by making them healthier. Wilkinson focuses on efforts relating to tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy foods. To determine whether such efforts promote wellbeing, we need to know whether unhealthy choices align with the chooser’s wellbeing. There are reasons to think unhealthy choices may be misaligned with wellbeing, but they are inconclusive. For example, tempting or deceptive advertisements for unhealthy products abound, which suggests that some people may choose unhealthy behaviors because they are tempted or misled; however, evidence about the precise effects of advertising is incomplete (149-156). Wilkinson argues that a good practical test for whether unhealthy choices align with a person’s wellbeing involves determining whether they all-things-considered regret their behavior (77-79). There is insufficient evidence to show that most drinkers regret their drinking habits (89-94) or most unhealthy eaters their eating habits (94-99). However, there is evidence to show that cigarette smokers regret having started smoking (81-89). This suggests that smoking does not align with smokers’ preferences and that smokers are making a prudential mistake. Wilkinson concludes that interventions designed to curb smoking probably promote wellbeing. Existing evidence does not support the same conclusion for alcohol and unhealthy foods.

While Wilkinson’s remarks about healthism are important, he ignores some considerations that complicate his picture. For one, Wilkinson focuses on physical health and speaks little about mental health, despite the fact that public health is concerned with both. For instance, the World Health Organization has, since 1948, included mental health as a core tenet of health (Bickenbach, 2017). Since there is a tighter connection between mental health and wellbeing, the assumption that promoting health, broadly construed, promotes wellbeing is more reasonable than Wilkinson’s remarks suggest. Another complicating consideration is that some subfields of public health are significantly more sensitive to the hazards of healthism than the subfields Wilkinson focuses on. For example, sexual and reproductive health professionals have been increasingly integrating pleasure and choice into their conception of sexual wellbeing for decades (Gruskin and Kismödi, 2020; Mitchell et al., 2021); another is that public health professionals concerned about social media use acknowledge that health risks, such as sleep disturbances and depression, should be weighed against potential benefits, such as social connection and opportunities for creative expression (Social Media and Youth Mental Health, 2025). These complications suggest that the profession is already more alive to Wilkinson’s healthism critiques than he acknowledges.

Wilkinson’s second main point is that many paternalistic interventions threaten to infringe on autonomy without producing a sufficiently compensatory benefit to wellbeing. Wilkinson views autonomy as the capacity to make competent decisions within a sphere of personal sovereignty (102-105). He levies incisive critiques at several arguments that purport to show paternalistic interventions need not interfere with autonomy. The most interesting parts of this discussion concern self-binding, nudges, and inequity.

Some paternalistic interventions are contingent upon the direct consent of a target who, like Ulysses on the mast, seeks to bind herself against anticipated mistakes (cf. Parfit, 1984, 326-329). Wilkinson illustrates with the example of a New Zealand law that empowers self-described problem gamblers to make it the case that they are not permitted to enter a casino (Gambling Act 2003 §310). Other voluntary self-exclusion schemes elsewhere in the world address gambling problems (Hopfgartner et al., 2023), suicide by firearm (Barks et al., 2025), and opioid use (Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services 2018). Wilkinson argues that self-binding interventions do not raise deep autonomy concerns and, as an added advantage, can rest on an individual’s judgement about the particular relationship between their health and wellbeing. In principle, then, he approves. However, Wilkinson is skeptical that people would want to bind themselves through such schemes and so is not optimistic about them in practice (126-132).

We suspect that self-binding schemes would be more utilized if they were better known, tested, and normalized. In principle, a public health apparatus could enable citizens to easily bind themselves in fine-grained ways that are tailored to help them avoid mistakes and more effectively pursue their ends. For example, a paternalistic policy could, in principle, be designed to enable a person to make it illegal for bars to sell them more than two drinks on weekdays. Such creative possibilities deserve more discussion.

Another kind of paternalistic intervention involves nudges, which are standardly understood as modifications of “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008, 6). Because nudges enable targets to opt out of their influence, Wilkinson thinks nudges do not infringe on autonomy and are, in this sense, a promising paternalistic tool.

Again, however, the picture Wilkinson paints is more complex than his focus on certain subfields suggests. While it is plausible to say the state may alter the choice architecture of decisions about purchasing unhealthy consumables, it is less clear when these interventions are permissible in more intimate spheres that Wilkinson hardly discusses, such as sexuality or family life. Moreover, it is not always possible to opt out from the presence of nudges, and repeated exposure over long periods of time may feel noxious (especially in intimate spheres) or increase the chances that people act against their preferences. Consequently, Wilkinson’s remarks about nudges in public health feel somewhat incomplete.

Wilkinson’s arguments concerning paternalism and equity will feel especially cutting to public health readers. Health inequalities between the rich and poor are generally viewed by public health as a product or form of inequity. Unhealthy choices exacerbate these inequalities. Many public health writers conclude that paternalistic interventions on unhealthy choices decrease inequity. Wilkinson’s healthism critiques problematize this argument. A poor person might choose an unhealthy option because it is the prudentially best option available to them; interventions that remove or discourage such an option would likely make the person worse off and possibly increase inequity. Generally speaking, paternalistic prohibitions improve poor people’s wellbeing only on the assumption that poor people are incompetent choosers. Yet this assumption, in Wilkinson’s view, is unjustified by current evidence. Wilkinson thinks it better to address inequity through increasing people’s options, e.g., in the form of cash payments, instead of prohibitions (196-210).

Wilkinson’s critique is compelling. The idea that poor people have the most to gain from having options removed arguably expresses the sentiment that poor people are the worst choosers. This sentiment is classist and fits conveniently into a neoliberal ideology that says the poor are poor because they are worse. Paternalistic prohibitions that are specifically intended to help the poor, such as regressive taxes on unhealthy drinks or prohibitions on varieties of products mostly consumed by the poor, e.g., menthol cigarettes (Caraballo and Asman, 2011), are part of the architecture of inequity that public health advocates want to ameliorate.

This book is written as many sectors of public health shift away from a simplistic focus on health and safety towards more complex, multidisciplinary, and holistic understandings of wellbeing (Lee and Lee, 2025). These shifts are occurring along multiple dimensions, including embracing mental, social, and spiritual health within the purview of public health (Long et al., 2024); popularizing harm reduction techniques; increasing commitment to political and economic advocacy, e.g., universal basic income; centering new perspectives on health and wellbeing from disability advocates; and focusing on Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) beyond simple life expectancy. Wilkinson seems to be moving with the tide.

Overall, Wilkinson underscores important considerations about assumptions baked into public health and points to research gaps that could be illuminated with thoughtful studies interrogating people’s motivations, regrets, and preferences. The book concludes with an ethical checklist for public health interventions. This may be the most interesting and constructive portion of the book for public health practitioners. The checklist is reflective of how, as Wilkinson says, skepticism need not be opposition.

REFERENCES

Barks, Bryan, Shannon Frattaroli, and Paul S. Nestadt. 2025. “Psychiatrists’ Awareness and Use of Voluntary Self-Prohibition as a Firearm Suicide Prevention Tool in Virginia.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 53 (3): 446–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2025.10125.

Bickenbach, Jerome. 2017. “WHO’s Definition of Health: Philosophical Analysis.” In Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine, edited by T. Schramme and S. Edwards. Springer.

Caraballo, Ralph S., and Katherine Asman. 2011. “Epidemiology of Menthol Cigarette Use in the United States.” Tobacco Induced Diseases 9 (Suppl 1): S1. https://doi.org/10.1186/1617-9625-9-S1-S1.

Gambling Act, New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (2003). https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2003/0051/latest/DLM207497.html.

Gruskin, Sofia, and Eszter Kismödi. 2020. “A Call for (Renewed) Commitment to Sexual Health, Sexual Rights, and Sexual Pleasure: A Matter of Health and Well-Being.” American Journal of Public Health 110 (2): 159–60. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305497.

Hopfgartner, Niklas, Michael Auer, Denis Helic, and Mark D. Griffiths. 2023. “The Efficacy of Voluntary Self-Exclusions in Reducing Gambling Among a Real-World Sample of British Online Casino Players.” Journal of Gambling Studies 39 (4): 1833–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-023-10198-y.

Lee, Kheng Hock, and Chien Earn Lee. 2025. “The Evolving Landscape of Health and Social Care Integration: In Search of a Unifying Theory.” Frontiers in Medicine 12 (July): 1464699. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2025.1464699.

Long, Katelyn N. G., Xavier Symons, Tyler J. VanderWeele, et al. 2024. “Spirituality As A Determinant Of Health: Emerging Policies, Practices, And Systems: Article Examines Spirituality as a Social Determinant of Health.” Health Affairs 43 (6): 783–90. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.01643.

Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services. 2018. Voluntary Non-Opioid Directive. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. https://www.mass.gov/news/voluntary-non-opioid-directive.

Mitchell, Kirstin R., Ruth Lewis, Lucia F. O’Sullivan, and J. Dennis Fortenberry. 2021. “What Is Sexual Wellbeing and Why Does It Matter for Public Health?” The Lancet Public Health 6 (8): e608–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(21)00099-2.

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press.

Social Media and Youth Mental Health. 2025. U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. U.S. Surgeon General.

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jacob Sparks and Martin Wilkinson for comments on a previous draft.